Optical networking startup Lumilens launches with $900M in funding
Lumilens Inc., a provider of optical networking chips for artificial intelligence clusters, launched today with $900 million in funding.
The company raised the bulk of the capital, $700 million, through a Series C round that valued it at $5.51 billion. Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital jointly led the investment. They were joined by more than a dozen others including Qualcomm Inc.
Lumilens is led by co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ankur Singla. His previous two networking startups, Contrail Systems Inc. and Volterra Inc., were sold for a combined $676 million. Two-year-old Lumilens says that it has already received billions of dollars worth of chip orders.
Data center operators historically used copper wires to move data between processors. Lumilens’ chips make it possible to replace copper interconnects with faster fiber-optic cabling. The company makes optical chips for two use cases: scale-up and scale-out networking. The former term describes technology that links together chips in a single rack, while scale-out networks connect different racks.
