Socratic Partners Leads PicoJool’s $27.5M Series A for AI Optics
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PicoJool has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding led by Socratic Partners, with Hudson River Trading (HRT) participating. The round follows a $12 million seed led by Playground Global and brings PicoJool’s total funding to $39.5 million.
PicoJool is headquartered in Palo Alto, with research and development and operations in the United States and Taiwan. Founded by photonics industry veteran and CEO Al Yuen, it develops optical chips and modules that give hyperscale AI data centers high-bandwidth, low-cost connectivity.
The California company will use the money to grow its teams and facilities in the United States and Taiwan as it brings its Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) and optical link products to market. It plans to build out research and development, operations, sales and marketing, along with the capacity to qualify, manufacture and support products for hyperscalers and data center operators.
AI clusters keep adding processors and moving more data between them, which strains both interconnect performance and data center power budgets. PicoJool is taking the cost and manufacturing strengths of VCSEL technology and applying them to optical connectivity products meant to scale from 800G to 1.6T, 3.2T and beyond. Customer interest is also growing in its microVCSEL products, including a 50G NRZ configuration for optical compute interconnects and 64G NRZ/PAM4 configurations for PCIe 6.0 based NPO applications. Early sampling of its chip-level VCSELs has already started.
The portfolio spans high-speed 100G and 200G VCSELs and lower-power 50G NRZ and 64G NRZ/PAM4 microVCSELs. The microVCSEL platform relies on a massively parallel architecture that raises aggregate bandwidth while cutting the energy needed to move each bit. In June, PicoJool unveiled its 200G VCSEL and microVCSEL family for scale-up AI data centers. The 200G products exceed 37GHz of bandwidth, and quad 100G, quad 200G and 32x50G NRZ microVCSEL options give customers several routes to 1.6T connectivity.
To get its 200G VCSELs ready for production, PicoJool is working with WIN Semiconductor and other gallium arsenide foundries. WIN has shipped more than one billion chips over the past decade. PicoJool is also working with system companies and hyperscalers to define next-generation pluggable, NPO and co-packaged optics.
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