CScale

AI Infrastructure · Optical Interconnect · Semiconductors

Funding

CScale exits stealth with $145M Series C for AI interconnect tech

At gigawatt scale, laser failures become routine, and keeping compute running through them determines whether AI factories scale economically.

• CScale emerged from stealth announcing a $145 million Series C led by Atreides Management, with Valor Equity Partners and Premji Invest as co-leads, bringing total funding to $188 million.
• Founded in 2023 and based in Palo Alto, CScale builds optical interconnect — light-based links that let thousands of AI accelerators act as one massive computer across racks.
• CEO Martin Lund previously ran Cisco's Common Hardware Group covering silicon and optics; CTO Sanjai Kohli co-founded SiRF and later Inovi, which Facebook acquired in 2014.
• Nvidia and Intel Capital joined as CScale's first strategic investors, a sign that chipmakers want a stake in the optics meant to link their own accelerators at scale.
• Rather than isolating lasers for easy replacement, CScale integrates lasers onto the chip and architects the system to contain failures without interrupting compute.
• The roughly 85-person startup has proof-of-concept systems with customers under NDA and plans to ship production chips by 2028.
• CScale joins a surge of optical-interconnect funding: Lumilens raised $700M in August, Celero raised $275M, and Eliyan took a $145M Series C in July.
• As AI clusters scale toward gigawatt power budgets, the bottleneck shifts from raw bandwidth to reliability — making fault-tolerant optics, not just faster ones, the next competitive battleground.