Lumilens has emerged from stealth with more than $900 million in total funding as it develops optical connectivity systems for large-scale AI data centers. The company announced more than $700 million in new financing co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital. The round values Lumilens at $5.51 billion.
Other investors included Addition, Alkeon, HarbourVest, J.P. Morgan Private Capital, Mayfield, MVP Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Peak XV, Redpoint Ventures and Seifdune.
Founded two years ago, Lumilens is already shipping its first product into production AI data centers through a multibillion-dollar customer agreement with a major hyperscaler.
The company designs optical interconnects for both scale-up networks, which connect GPUs inside tightly coupled computing systems, and scale-out networks linking racks and clusters throughout data centers.
Lumilens is addressing a growing bottleneck in AI infrastructure as the number of GPUs deployed in data centers increases faster than available optical networking capacity.
The company said a 400,000-GPU data center can require more than 2.4 million optical transceivers and over five million fiber strands. Industry projections indicate significant shortages of both 800-gigabit and 1.6-terabit transceivers.
Its portfolio includes near-package optics, co-packaged optics and pluggable 800G and 1.6T transceivers.
All products are based on LumiCore, Lumilens’ internally developed technology platform spanning silicon photonics, mixed-signal integrated circuits, electrical-optical interposers and optical systems.
The new funding will expand the company’s silicon, systems, software, process engineering and high-volume manufacturing operations.
KEY QUOTES:
“The constraint on AI has shifted from how many GPUs you can buy to how many you can connect.”
“We built Lumilens to deliver both, and to manufacture at the volume, quality and pace this buildout demands.”
Ankur Singla, Founder and CEO of Lumilens
“Speed and scale are a formidable combination, and we’re thrilled to lead this round.”
Gavin Baker, Managing Partner at Atreides Management
