Lumilens Inc., a two-year-old startup developing optical networking chips for artificial intelligence clusters, has raised $900 million in fresh funding to scale its manufacturing and product development. The bulk of the capital, $700 million, came through a Series C round that valued the company at $5.51 billion.
The round was jointly led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital. Qualcomm participated alongside more than a dozen other investors. The company is led by co-founder and chief executive Ankur Singla, whose previous networking Startups, Contrail Systems and Volterra, were acquired for a combined $676 million.
Data centers have historically relied on copper wiring to move data between processors. At the speeds now required by AI clusters — 1.6 terabits per second — copper signals degrade after roughly one meter, effectively confining high-bandwidth connections to a single server rack. Lumilens replaces those copper links with fiber-optic cabling, which carries more data over longer distances while consuming less power. For operators building clusters of thousands of graphics processing units, that shift is becoming essential.
The company is pursuing two complementary approaches. Its Co-Packaged Optics, or CPO, integrate optical engines directly into GPU packages, shortening the data path and improving power efficiency. Singla said CPO can link thousands of GPUs. The second family, Near-Packaged Optics, or NPO, sits on the motherboard adjacent to the GPU. NPO is less efficient than CPO but easier to deploy with current infrastructure. Singla estimates large-scale volume deployment of co-packaged optics remains two to three years away. Lumilens taped out its first chip in 2024; a second-generation design has been completed and is slated for commercial deployment next year.
For scale-out networking — connecting entire racks together — Lumilens supplies chips for pluggable transceivers that attach to switches. The technology supports 800 gigabits per second, 1.6 terabits per second and higher rates, eliminating the distance constraints that make copper impractical beyond a single rack.
All Lumilens chips are built on LumiCore, a shared platform of photonic components, mixed-signal integrated circuits and interposers that serve as the base layer for optical and electronic elements. The company says LumiCore reduces development cycles from years to months. Lumilens has also built a custom manufacturing workflow that incorporates robotics and AI-driven software to support volume production.
The $900 million will accelerate chip development and manufacturing capacity. As AI labs race to build ever-larger clusters, Lumilens is betting that optical networking will become the backbone of next-generation AI infrastructure.
