CScale emerged from stealth with $145 million in Series C funding to accelerate the development and commercialization of optical interconnect technology for large-scale AI infrastructure. The round brings CScale’s total funding to $188 million. The financing was co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Premji Invest. Sutter Hill Ventures, which has backed CScale since its founding, also participated alongside existing investor Maverick Silicon. NVIDIA and Intel Capital joined the round as CScale’s first strategic investors.
CScale is developing optical interconnect technology for AI scale-up systems, where large numbers of accelerators must communicate with high bandwidth and very low latency as if they were part of one larger computer.
The company is targeting future gigawatt-class AI data centers, where scale-up domains could span thousands of tightly connected accelerators across dozens of racks.
CScale said the reliability requirements of these systems become increasingly important as deployments grow.
While failures may be rare on individual optical links, the company said that across fleets containing hundreds of thousands of accelerators, such failures can become a continuous operational issue.
CScale is therefore designing its interconnect architecture to contain optical failures without interrupting compute workloads.
The company said its goal is to improve continuity at the system level rather than focusing only on making individual components easier to replace.
CScale is building an integrated light engine intended to provide reliable optical connectivity for AI infrastructure operating at gigawatt scale.
The company plans to use the Series C financing to accelerate product development and commercialization as demand for high-performance AI infrastructure continues to increase.
CScale was founded in 2023 by Chief Technology Officer Sanjai Kohli.
Kohli previously co-founded SiRF, which helped bring GPS technology to the mass market, and later founded Inovi, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014.
CEO Martin Lund brings decades of experience across silicon, networking, and hardware infrastructure.
He previously built Broadcom’s switching business into a billion-dollar franchise and held senior roles at Microsoft and Cadence.
Most recently, Lund led Cisco’s Common Hardware Group, overseeing silicon, hardware systems, and optics, including Silicon One.
CScale is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has approximately 85 employees globally.
KEY QUOTES:
“As AI scale-up domains extend across dozens of racks, optical interconnect becomes essential. At that scale, reliable, predictable communication is fundamental to system economics. Easier part replacement improves serviceability, not continuity. We’re designing the interconnect for continuity. Lasers will fail. Compute shouldn’t.”
Martin Lund, CEO of CScale
“AI infrastructure is no longer just a compute problem. It is a systems problem. As scale-up systems move toward gigawatt-class deployments, interconnect bandwidth means nothing without system reliability. Every optical failure is a compute failure. At this scale, failures are not hypothetical—they are inevitable. CScale is designing reliable scale-up optics for next-generation AI factories, unlocking the full performance of optics without trade-offs.”
Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Atreides Management
“CScale’s strength is its architectural judgment: understanding which technical choices create value for the entire system. The team combines deep expertise across photonics, electronics, and software with the deployment experience to turn optical capability into dependable AI infrastructure. At Premji Invest, we partner with teams that think big and have the discipline to build enduring companies, and CScale is exactly that. We are proud to co-lead this financing and support CScale as they bring transformative solutions to market.”
Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest
