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Volantis gets $9M seed fund for VCSEL-based interconnects

17 Jun 2025

Bay Area startup backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman and others to go beyond silicon photonics.

Volantis

Volantis, a startup company in San Mateo, California, says it has attracted seed funding of $9 million to help it develop photonic interconnects based around densely parallel optical waveguides.

Said to offer a step change in bandwidth and power consumption, the approach relies on directly modulated vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), resulting in what the firm claims to be “a new class of photonic compute architecture that moves beyond the limitations of silicon photonics”.

Parallel lines
Founded in 2022 by CEO Tapa Ghosh and CTO Roy Meade, Volantis has attracted financial support from some high-profile backers - notably OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

“Using a fundamentally different approach - direct laser modulation and wafer-scale integration - Volantis enables ultra-efficient communication across highly connected compute systems,” claims the firm.

“This architecture packs the power of a server rack into a chip-scale package, reducing energy consumption and cost while dramatically increasing compute speed.”

The idea is to solve today’s key bottleneck in computational AI - the bandwidth and power required to move data between chips.

“While photonics has long been seen as the answer, silicon photonics - the dominant approach for the past two decades - has consistently failed to scale inside systems,” states Volantis.

It wants to improve conventional chip interconnects by integrating directly modulated lasers with on-chip optical waveguides - something that should enable lots of low-powered links to work in parallel, imitating the way that GPUs speed computation.

Volantis believes that it can provide a 15-fold improvement in performance per dollar while improving stability and reducing power consumption.

“In just two years Volantis has already built working, patent-pending prototypes, validating that photonics inside the computer outperforms traditional silicon photonics,” it claims.

‘Photonic compute platform’
CEO Ghosh - whose LinkedIn profile indicates completed a fellowship backed by controversial tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel after dropping out of a computer science degree course at the University of California, Berkeley - said in a Volantis release:

“We’re not just making an incrementally better AI chip. We’ve solved long-standing challenges that have kept photonics out of computers.

“Instead of relying on silicon photonics, we’ve scaled a new class of low-cost, low-power, directly modulated lasers and coupled them into densely parallel optical waveguides - something never done at this scale before. The result is the photonic compute platform the AI era has been waiting for.”

CTO Meade brings significant industrial experience to the company, having led high-bandwidth memory development at chip giant Micron before joining silicon photonics and optical interconnect pioneer Ayar Labs as its VP of engineering.

Volantis also cites the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) professor and photonic integration expert Clint Schow as a company adviser. In the same release Schow said of Volantis’ technology:

“This new approach takes proven, low-cost VCSEL technology and unleashes it at scale to deliver a wafer-scale AI processor. Volantis is not trying to retrofit today’s chips; they’re building what the next decade of compute will require.”

Aeluma advances interconnect photodetectors
Meanwhile Aeluma, the Santa Barbara startup that manufactures optoelectronic and photonic devices that combine compound semiconductor functionality with silicon-like scale, has won a contract from the US Navy to advance high-speed photodetectors for photonic interconnects.

Worth up to $1.3 million, the development project is said to include a “major global interconnect manufacturer” as a proposed subcontractor, alongside support from a “top-tier” government prime contractor.

Aeluma says that its large-diameter wafer platform is compatible with wafer-scale integration of CMOS electronics using advanced packaging for next-generation optical interconnects.

“This award is a clear vote of confidence in Aeluma's breakthrough technology and its potential to scale both in performance and in volume,” commented Matthew Dummer, the firm’s director of technology.

“Building on our successful demonstrations of large-wafer photodetectors for sensing and communication applications, this funding will enable us to accelerate commercialization for high-growth commercial markets while meeting the demanding requirements of our customers in defense and aerospace.”

CHROMA TECHNOLOGY CORP.Optikos Corporation Nyfors Teknologi ABSPECTROGON ABUniverse Kogaku America Inc.LASEROPTIK GmbHUniversal Photonics, Inc.
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