Ayar Labs raises $35M as interest in optical I/O grows

Existing investor participation includes BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures, and Playground Global. With the new investment, Ayar Labs aims to accelerate product development and commercialisation of its in-package optical interconnect (I/O) solution, as well as grow the company’s footprint internationally. Optical I/O (OIO) solves the major computing bottlenecks in interconnect bandwidth, power consumption, and reach. Removing these bottlenecks will enable new system architectures that can bring improvements in power, performance, area, and cost beyond the limits of traditional Moore’s Law scaling in important applications such as artificial intelligence, high performance computing, cloud, telecommunications, and aerospace, a press release reads. “Over the last year, we have continued to invest and grow our organization, and have demonstrated a number of technology firsts while securing additional customer and ecosystem relationships,” says Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “The investment interest from new and existing strategic and financial investors despite these difficult global times allows us to continue executing our long-range plan for making Ayar Labs Optical I/O a ubiquitous computing solution.” Hsien-Hui Tong, Executive Director, Venture Investing, SGInnovate adds that “In the near future, the need for higher bandwidth will lead to short distance connections within data centres to be optical in nature. We believe that Ayar Labs has market leading technology in the area of in-package optics that will potentially revolutionise the industry and are delighted to be joining the round as investors.”