Optical networking startup Lumilens launches with $900M in funding

Optical networking startup Lumilens Inc. launched today with $900 million in funding. The company announced it raised $700 million in 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 were sold for a combined $676 million. The two-year-old company says it has already received billions of dollars worth of chip orders. Lumilens makes optical chips for scale-up and scale-out networking in artificial intelligence clusters. The chips are designed to replace copper interconnects with faster fiber-optic cabling. The company targets the scale-up market with co-packaged optics and near-packaged optics chip families. It also makes chips for scale-out networks that ship as pluggable transceivers supporting bandwidth of 800 gigabits per second or more. Lumilens says its LumiCore architecture reduces chip development time from years to months. The company will use the capital to accelerate chip development and manufacturing efforts.