Volantis

Semiconductors · AI Infrastructure · Photonics

Funding

Volantis raises $88M Series A to link AI chips with light, not wires

Its optical approach could let one GPU access 220 memory chips instead of the eight current designs are stuck with.

• Volantis announced an $88 million Series A on October 1, 2026, co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic and Susa Ventures also participating.
• The San Francisco startup is building A-1, a photonic system that connects AI compute chips to memory using laser light instead of electrical wires, aiming to erase the industry's memory-bandwidth tradeoff.
• Today's GPUs can surround each chip with only about eight high-bandwidth memory chips due to the limited reach of electrical wiring; Volantis says its optical links could support roughly 220.
• The architecture relies on VCSELs, the same vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers already mass-produced for facial-recognition sensors in hundreds of millions of iPhones, which Volantis hopes sidesteps new supply-chain risk.
• Volantis is designing A-1 to run models exceeding 20 trillion parameters at up to 10,000 tokens per second per user, with first customer deliveries targeted for 2027.
• The new round brings Volantis' total funding to $97 million, with founding engineers drawn from NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom and Ayar Labs who previously worked on the first CoWoS packaging and early co-packaged optics systems.
• As AI labs push toward ever-larger models, memory bandwidth — not raw compute — is becoming the binding constraint on inference speed, making interconnect innovation as consequential as the chips themselves.