Lumilens has raised more than $700 million with a pitch about replacing knackered copper cabling in AI data centres with light.
According to Wall Street Journal said the two-year-old San Jose outfit was valued at $5.5 billion in the latest round.
Lumilens has now raised more than $900 million since launch and has started shipping kit to an unnamed hyperscale cloud provider. The company claims the deal is worth billions of dollars during the next few years, which is not bad for a startup.
The outfit’s premise is simple enough: AI chips are getting faster, while moving data between them is becoming a bigger pain. Lumilens wants to replace some copper wiring with optical connections, which use light to shift data through fibre.
Copper remains cheap and reliable, but it starts to creak when data volumes rise across longer distances.
Lumilens chief executive Ankur Singla said optics still has a price problem compared with copper.
“Copper is way cheaper today and will be way cheaper than optics,” Singla said.
The company is working on optical products for linking server racks across data centres and for connecting chips inside a single rack.
Seligman Ventures managing partner Umesh Padval said the AI boom could finally drag optics into wider use: “Optics has always been there, but never used,” he said.
