PicoJool, a semiconductor startup backed by former Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, said today it has raised $27.5 million in early-stage funding to help ease the strain on artificial intelligence data centers.
The Series A round was led by Socratic Partners, with participation from Hudson River Trading. The new funding brings PicoJool's total raised to $39.5 million, following a $12 million seed round last November led by Gelsinger's venture capital firm Playground Global.
PicoJool is developing Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser, or VCSEL, a type of semiconductor laser diode that transmits data as light signals through optical cables instead of traditional wire, enabling faster data center communications. The startup has built optical chips and modules based on the technology, which it says can drastically improve the performance and energy efficiency of large AI chip clusters.
Data center operators are seeking faster, more efficient connectivity as AI models grow more powerful and require larger clusters of graphics processing units and other accelerators. The largest enterprises now run clusters holding hundreds, sometimes thousands, of AI processors that constantly exchange data packets to work in unison on AI workloads. That traffic is straining the traditional copper wire interconnects linking the chips, which cannot keep up with the bandwidth demands of the largest AI clusters and consume vast amounts of energy, driving up the cost of running AI.
PicoJool founder and Chief Executive Al Yuen said the company addresses the bottleneck by replacing older interconnects with its high-speed 100G and 200G VCSEL products. It also offers low-power MicroVCSEL configurations, including its 50G NRZ and 64G NRZ/PAM4 interconnects. According to PicoJool, the MicroVCSEL platform uses a massively parallel architecture that aggregates bandwidth while sharply reducing the energy costs of moving data around AI clusters, providing a pathway to connectivity of up to 3.2 terabits per second of bandwidth.
Yuen said reaching 200G per lane proved the performance is there, and that the company's focus is now execution. He said the funding will let PicoJool expand its teams in the U.S. and Taiwan, qualify products with customers and move a complete portfolio from chip-level VCSELs and MicroVCSELs into AOC and NPO modules. Some funds will also accelerate research and development and grow its operations and sales teams, though the main focus is commercializing existing technology. PicoJool is working with WIN Semiconductors Corp. and other chip foundries to prepare the 200G VCSEL for mass production, followed by its other products.
Gelsinger said he was attracted to PicoJool by its ambition and by its viable solution to the AI data center bandwidth bottleneck that has constrained AI deployments globally. He said the network is the AI and connectivity is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance, and that the industry needs a solution that can increase bandwidth while sharply improving power and cost.
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