Ayar Labs is a Photonics & Interconnects company founded in 2015 and based in San Jose, USA. It has raised $844M in total funding, most recently a Series E in 2026 at a $3.8B valuation.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Valuation | Lead investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 11, 2024 | Series D | $155M | $1B | Advent Global Opportunities, Light Street Capital |
| Apr 26, 2022 | Series C | $130M |
| — |
| Boardman Bay Capital Management |
| Nov 5, 2020 | Series B | $35M | — | Downing Ventures, BlueSky Capital |
| Jan 1, 2018 | Series A | $24M | — | Playground Global |

As AI shifts from training to inference, optical interconnect makers are moving silicon photonics closer to the chip to reduce power and latency.

Semiconductor startups raise $10.7B in 2026 YTD; Cerebras went public after a $1B pre-IPO round, while MatX and Ayar Labs each closed $500M rounds.

Optical interconnects, particularly co-packaged optics (CPO), will dominate data-center scale-up architecture to address AI compute bottlenecks in the next five years.
An in-package optical I/O chiplet that co-packages with CPUs, GPUs, switches, and accelerators to replace electrical SerDes with light, delivering terabit-class chip-to-chip bandwidth at a fraction of the energy and far longer reach. Ayar has demonstrated 4 Tbps links (2 Tbps each direction) between TeraPHY chiplets. It is the company's flagship product and a leading approach to the interconnect bottleneck in AI clusters.
A multi-wavelength, external laser 'light source' that supplies the optical power for TeraPHY chiplets, engineered for the reliability and serviceability that data centers require by keeping the laser separate from the compute package. SuperNova works in tandem with TeraPHY to form a complete optical-I/O solution, and is central to making co-packaged optics practical at scale for HPC and AI systems.
31 patents on file, but none with both an extractable figure and an abstract on Google Patents yet.