Reimagining AI data centers, Xscape Photonics announced Tuesday that it closed a $44 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by IAG Capital Partners with participation from Altair, Cisco Investments, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, NVIDIA and OUP.
Started in 2022, the silicon photonics startup is striving to solve energy, performance and scalability challenges in AI data centers with their fully programmable, multi-color photonics technology ChromX.
“Historically, performance and scalability challenges have been addressed by building bigger data centers to train large language models. This approach is not sustainable and unlocks a myriad of additional issues around energy consumption and cost,” said Vivek Raghunathan, Co-founder and CEO of Xscape Photonics in the press release.
“At Xscape Photonics, we are on a mission to help our customers completely reimagine how they solve these challenges. This funding validates our mission and positions us for future growth to support next-generation AI data centers.”
READ: Data governance startup Relyance AI lands $32 million in Series B funding round (October 15, 2024)
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), workloads driven by AI will account for over 20% of the energy consumption in large-scale data centers by 2025. With such rapid growth, AI centers might struggle to meet energy efficiency and performance.
Xscape Photonics aims to support the new age of AI by developing photonic platform solutions designed for ultra-high bandwidth connections inside data centers to power Generative AI systems. The silicon photonics startup plans to scale AI computing performance in an environmentally sustainable manner as well as utilize a solution that can hit “volume, cost and density targets.”
In a statement, the company said the latest funding will be used towards accelerating the development of Xscape Photonics’ ChromX platform, a scalable platform designed for AI data center fabrics. The recent investment raises Xscape’s funding to $57 million.
Founded by a team of experts – CEO Vivek Raghunathan, President Alexander Gaeta, and Head of R&D Yoshi Okawachi – Xscape is a product of silicon photonics pioneers.
READ: Activism and Alpha: Himanshu Shah’s blueprint for long-term success at Shah Capital (October 14, 2024)
Raghunathan has over 15 years of experience in silicon photonics, working at various capacities for Integrated Silicon Photonics at Broadcom and prior to that, at Rockley Photonics. He started his career at Intel where he led the commercialization of their first Silicon-photonics-based transceivers. Raghunathan has a doctorate from MIT in Material Science and Engineering.
Gaeta is a world leader in quantum and nonlinear photonics, holding appointments in the departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He was awarded the Townes Medal in 2019 and is a Fellow of Optica, the American Physical Society, and IEEE.
With over 10 years of research expertise in silicon photonics and optical frequency combs, Okawachi has published over 90 peer-reviewed journal papers and is a co-inventor on six patents. He is a Fellow of Optica, the 2017 Optica Ambassador, and is the recipient of the 2017 Tingye Li Innovation Price. He holds a PhD from Cornell University in Applied Physics.