Celero Communications, a two-year-old chip startup, has raised $275m in a Series C round that values it at more than $3bn. It makes the processors that push data down fibre optic cables between AI chips, racks and whole data centres. Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund, co-led the round.
Dina Bass of Bloomberg reported the round on 8 September, ahead of the company’s own announcement the same day. Existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon also took part. Celero has now raised $415m in total. Gavin Baker, managing partner and chief investment officer at Atreides, joins its board.
All three lead investors were already on the cap table. CapitalG led Celero’s $100m Series B last November. That took its funding to $140m at the time, according to the company’s earlier announcement. Valor, Atreides, Sutter Hill and Maverick Silicon took part in that round too. The November announcement gave no valuation, so the size of the step up is not public.
The company is based in Irvine, California, with design centres in Canada and Argentina. Its founders are Nariman Yousefi, the chief executive, and Oscar Agazzi. The pair previously worked as executives at Marvell, and Yousefi spent 17 years at Broadcom, where he ran its networking unit.
