Silicon photonics startup Xscape Photonics has closed a $44 million Series A funding round.
The raise was led by IAG Capital Partners and saw participation from Cisco Investments and Nvidia. It brings the total amount raised by the company to $57m.
Founded in 2022 by Alexander Gaeta, Vivek Raghunathan, and Yoshi Okawachi, Xscape provides photonic chips for high-speed connections in high-performance computing systems and data centers.
In a statement, the company said the funds would be used to accelerate the development of its ChromX platform – a scalable, multi-color photonics platform for AI data center fabrics.
According to Xscape, the platform maximizes “escape bandwidth” out of GPUs by 10X, reduces power consumption by 10X compared to incumbent solutions, and improves overall inference performance for AI workloads.
“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 Raghunathan, the company's CEO. “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.”
