Optical interconnect startup CScale exited stealth following a $145 million Series C funding round that saw investment from Nvidia and Intel Capital.
The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Premji Invest, with additional participation from Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon. It brings the total raised by CScale to $188 million.
Founded in 2023 by the company CTO Sanjai Kohli, the Palo Alto, California-headquartered startup is developing an optical interconnect to support AI scale-up networking.
Few details have been provided by the startup about its technology, but in a statement, CScale said it is architecting its interconnect in such a way that when optical failures occur they are contained and not interrupt compute.
The startup added that the funding would allow it to accelerate the development and commercialization of its optical interconnect offering.
“As AI scale-up domains extend across dozens of racks, optical interconnect becomes essential,” CScale CEO Martin Lund noted. “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.”
Gavin Baker, managing partner and chief investment officer at Atreides Management, added: "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.”
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