Celero Communications has raised $275 million in Series C funding at a valuation of more than $3 billion, bringing total capital raised by the AI infrastructure semiconductor company to $415 million.
The financing was led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and CapitalG, with continued participation from existing investors including Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon.
As part of the funding, Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Atreides Management, will join Celero’s Board of Directors.
Celero plans to use the new capital to accelerate its product roadmap, expand research and development and increase production readiness as AI data centers demand higher-bandwidth and lower-power optical connectivity.
Alongside the financing, Celero announced the successful validation of what it describes as the industry’s first 2nm coherent DSP silicon, incorporating both digital signal processing and advanced analog technology.
The technology provides the foundation for Celero’s roadmap spanning 1.6T optical connectivity through next-generation 3.2T AI optical interconnects.
Celero said the 2nm process enables higher-speed, lower-power coherent transmission while improving fiber efficiency and supporting increasingly large networking platforms.
The company is targeting one of the most important infrastructure challenges emerging from the rapid scaling of artificial intelligence clusters.
As accelerator deployments increase, networks must move significantly larger quantities of data between processors, racks and data center facilities.
Celero believes conventional PAM4 optical architectures are approaching practical limits in bandwidth density and fiber scalability, creating an opportunity for coherent optical technology across scale-up, scale-out and scale-across AI networks.
The company cited projections from McKinsey & Company that global data centers could require nearly $7 trillion of investment by 2030, including approximately $5.2 trillion associated with AI workloads.
Celero was founded in 2024 by semiconductor industry executives with experience at Marvell, Inphi, Broadcom and ClariPhy.
The Irvine, California-based company also operates design centers in Canada and Argentina.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI infrastructure is rapidly outgrowing the capabilities of traditional optical interconnect architectures. Our 2nm silicon validation demonstrates that coherent technology can deliver the bandwidth density, power efficiency and scalability required for the next generation of AI networks. This investment gives us the resources to accelerate our roadmap, strengthen production readiness and bring the next generation of coherent connectivity to market faster.”
Nariman Yousefi, Co-Founder and CEO of Celero Communications
“Networking is now growing faster than compute, and connectivity is one of the most critical challenges in scaling AI infrastructure. The transition from PAM4 to coherent represents a fundamental shift in how the next generation of scale-up, scale-out and scale-across AI systems will be connected. Every data center will need coherent optics, no matter the accelerator or networking protocol. Celero was built for this transition, with the technology, team and execution track record to lead the coherent era.”
Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Atreides Management
“The next generation of AI compute will depend on the ability to scale connectivity across increasingly large accelerator clusters. Celero’s breakthrough 2nm coherent DSP technology provides the essential optical foundation that allows AI infrastructure to scale up and across massive data centers, overcoming the physical limits of last-generation technologies.”
James Luo, General Partner at CapitalG and Member of Celero’s Board of Directors
