Optical interconnectivity startup Celestial AI raised a $250 million Series C1 round led by Fidelity Management & Research Co. at a reported $2.5 billion valuation.
The fresh cash comes almost exactly a year after the company locked up a $175 million Series C led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund.
The Santa Clara, California-based startup’s photonic fabric platform helps separate compute and memory, making processing extensive AI faster and providing more energy-efficient computing.
The new round included participation from new investors including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Maverick Silicon, Tiger Global Management and Lip-Bu Tan, as well as participation from existing investors including AMD Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Temasek Holdings, Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund, Porsche Automobil Holding and Engine Ventures.
Big dollars
Founded in 2020, Celestial AI has now raised more than $515 million, per the company
The company’s photonic fabric helps solve one of generative AI’s biggest issues — untangling compute power and memory to make the technology more efficient.
“With the emergence of complex reasoning models and agentic AI, the requirements on AI infrastructure are compounding,” said CEO David Lazovsky in a statement. “Cluster sizes must scale from a few AI processors in a server to tens of processors in a single rack and thousands of processors across multiple racks, all while relying on high-bandwidth, low-latency network connectivity to handle massive data transfers between processors.”
Thanks to AI, chips seem to be the talk of tech right now. Just last month, EnCharge AI — a startup developing analog in-memory-computing AI chips — raised a Series B of more than $100 million led by Tiger Global.
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