Lumilens, the connectivity platform for AI infrastructure, has raised more than US$700 million in new funding co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures, and Spark Capital, with participation from Addition, Alkeon, Harbourvest, J.P. Morgan Private Capital, Mayfield, MVP Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Peak XV, Redpoint Ventures, Seifdune and other top-tier investors.
The financing values the company at US$5.51 billion and brings its total capital raised to over US$900 million.
In early 2024, the team that founded Lumilens set out to solve the connectivity problems the largest AI clusters foreshadowed – problems a top hyperscaler was already confronting as it sized the clusters its AI roadmap would require.
Within two years, Lumilens’ initial scale- out product finished qualification and then started shipping into that hyperscaler’s production AI data centers under a multi-billion-dollar agreement.
Lumilens designs and manufactures optical interconnects for both types of networks inside an AI data center – the scale-up network that directly connects GPUs together within a single compute system, and the scale-out fabric that stitches different racks and clusters together.
“The constraint on AI has shifted from how many GPUs you can buy to how many you can connect,” said Ankur Singla, founder and CEO of Lumilens.
“Whether they’re training frontier models or serving them to hundreds of millions of users, hyperscalers told us they need the same two things: far more optical capacity for the networks they run today, and a path to directly connecting thousands of GPUs together into a single cluster,” said Singla. “We built Lumilens to deliver both – and to manufacture at the volume, quality, and pace this buildout demands.”
The Lumilens portfolio spans the full connectivity stack of an AI data center. This includes scale-up silicon and systems (NPO and CPO) — near-package and co-packaged optics that bring optical I/O directly to the GPU, enabling thousands of processors — and, on the company’s roadmap, tens of thousands — to operate as a single, tightly coupled domain.
This also includes scale-out pluggable transceivers (800G, 1.6T, and beyond) — optical modules that replace copper links across racks and rows, carrying more data at lower power for the largest AI fabrics.
“Over the past several years, the conversation around AI infrastructure has centered on access to compute,” said Umesh Padval, managing partner, Seligman Ventures. “Increasingly, the constraint today is shifting to connectivity and how efficiently thousands of GPUs can operate as a single system.”
Gavin Baker, managing partner at Atreides Management, noted that Lumilens went from its founding to a qualified product deployed inside a hyperscaler’s production data centers within two years, and is building the manufacturing engine to scale with demand while bringing much-needed diversification to AI supply chains.
Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield, said connecting GPUs is the bottleneck now, and copper has hit a wall the industry can’t engineer around.
“That’s why we partnered with Ankur Singla for the third time to help build Lumilens from inception, led their seed round, and have participated in every round since. Lumilens designs and manufactures optical interconnects for both the scale-up and scale-out of AI infrastructure, and treats manufacturing as a product in its own right, from chip assembly to high-volume production,” said Chaddha.
To execute on the US$100+ billion market opportunity for photonic interconnects, Lumilens has assembled a leadership team with deep expertise in both photonics and large-scale networking systems, including executives and engineers from Cisco, Juniper Networks, Meta, Marvell, Lumentum, and Coherent.
The Lumilens Series C funding round includes participation from a wide range of top-tier investors: Addition, Aiconic, Alkeon, Atreides Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, EDBI (arm of SG Growth Capital, the investment platform of EDB and Enterprise Singapore), Harbourvest, J.P. Morgan Private Capital, Lingotto, Mayfield, Meritech, MVP Ventures, Peak XV, Qualcomm Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Seifdune, Seligman Ventures, Spark Capital and Thomvest Ventures.
The new funding will help the company expand its rapidly growing silicon, systems, software, process engineering, and high-volume manufacturing operations.
