Volantis, a semiconductor startup developing photonically integrated computers for the AI era, today emerged from stealth and announced a $9 million seed funding round. The round includes backing from Alex Wang (Scale AI) and Trevor Blackwell (Y Combinator). Sam Altman backed Volantis in April 2022, betting on the need for foundational breakthroughs in computing long before today’s AI infrastructure limitations became apparent.
Launched in 2022, Volantis is the first company to scale a new class of photonic compute architecture that moves beyond the limitations of silicon photonics. Utilizing a fundamentally different approach (direct laser modulation and wafer-scale integration), Volantis enables ultra-efficient communication across highly connected compute systems. This architecture has the power of a server rack in a chip-scale package, reducing energy consumption and cost while dramatically increasing compute speed.
Problem being addressed: The core bottleneck in AI computing now is the bandwidth and power required to move data between chips. While photonics has long been seen as the answer, silicon photonics—the dominant approach for the past two decades—has consistently failed to scale inside systems. And Volantis replaces traditional chip interconnects with energy-efficient optical channels, using parallelism to deliver high aggregate bandwidth with unmatched efficiency.
Volantis’ breakthrough comes from integrating directly modulated lasers with on-chip optical waveguides. This feat enables many slow, low-powered links to work in parallel, similar to the architectural advantage GPUs have in compute. This unique combination allows Volantis to achieve 15 times better performance per dollar, while improving stability and reducing power consumption. In just two years, Volantis has already built working, patent-pending prototypes, validating that photonics inside the computer outperforms traditional silicon photonics.
The Volantis team combines top optical and hardware engineering talent from companies like Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, Marvell, Rockley, Infinera, Lumentum, Juniper, Skorpios, and others. And Roy Meade, co-founder and CTO of Volantis, was the first employee and former VP of Engineering at Ayar Labs, one of the most prominent silicon photonics companies globally. He also successfully led the development of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) at Micron.
How the funding will be used: Volantis will utilize the funding to refine its chip architecture further, expand its world-class engineering team, and initiate early customer engagements.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re not just making an incrementally better AI chip. We’ve solved long-standing challenges that have kept photonics out of computers. Instead of relying on silicon photonics, we’ve scaled a new class of low-cost, low-power, directly modulated lasers and coupled them into densely parallel optical waveguides—something never done at this scale before. The result is the photonic compute platform the AI era has been waiting for.”
Tapa Ghosh, Volantis’ founder and CEO
“This new approach takes proven, low-cost VCSEL technology and unleashes it at scale to deliver a wafer-scale AI processor. Volantis is not trying to retrofit today’s chips; they’re building what the next decade of compute will require.”
Clint Schow, a leading photonics researcher and professor at UCSB, and advisor to Volantis
