Xscape Photonics, a company using silicon photonics to support the next generation of AI data centers, announced the successful closing of a $44 million Series A funding round, increasing the total amount raised to $57 million. IAG Capital Partners led the funding with investments from Altair, Cisco Investments, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, NVIDIA, and OUP. And the funding will be used to accelerate the development of Xscape Photonics’ ChromX platform, a scalable, multi-color, programmable photonics platform for AI data center fabrics.
Data centers have traditionally been constrained to transmit data streams over four colors on a single fiber. However, as bandwidth demand has grown, the need for a scalable laser and photonics platform becomes essential as vendors are unable to keep up with the surge in volume demand for lasers in these networks. And Xscape Photonics’ multi-wavelength photonics platform can handle hundreds of colors on a single fiber, providing flexibility and efficiency for AI workloads. Through the ChromX platform, Xscape Photonics is enabling hyperscale customers to reimagine the data center fabric by utilizing a scalable solution that can hit volume, cost and density targets.
Xscape Photonics was created in 2022 by three Silicon Photonics pioneers, a laser expert from Columbia University and a founding member of the Silicon Photonics team at Broadcom. And the team is comprised of PhDs and engineers with backgrounds in the semiconductor space from time at various organizations such as Broadcom, Cerebras, InPhi, Intel, Juniper, Lumentum, Marvell and Neophotonics.
KEY QUOTES:
“Historically, performance and scalability challenges have been addressed by building bigger data centers to train large language models. This approach is not sustainable and unlocks a myriad of additional issues around energy consumption and cost. At Xscape Photonics, we are on a mission to help our customers completely reimagine how they solve these challenges. This funding validates our mission and positions us for future growth to support next-generation AI data centers.”
-Vivek Raghunathan, Co-Founder and CEO of Xscape Photonics
“The performance scaling challenges are centered on the fundamental problem of “escape bandwidth” that results in a key bottleneck for AI workloads.”
-Keren Bergman, Co-Founder of Xscape Photonics
“We see tremendous value in the technology that Xscape Photonics is developing to solve challenges customers are facing with AI data center energy usage and bandwidth performance. The future of the data center will be built around photonics and this capital will help to dramatically accelerate Xscape Photonics’ product development.”
-Alex Kash, Associate at IAG Capital Partners
“We are excited about accelerating commercialization of our unique multi-color laser photonics technology for different custom use cases in the AI and hyperscaler markets.”
-Alexander Gaeta, Co-Founder and President of Xscape Photonics
