PicoJool to scale VCSEL production with $27.5M series A

PicoJool, the Palo Alto developer of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that emerged from stealth mode late last year, says it has now raised an additional $27.5 million in series A venture funding.

The Silicon Valley company plans to use that additional cash to boost production of 200 Gb/s devices for use in AI data center connectivity applications, with an investment in both personnel and its facilities in the US and Taiwan.

Also under development are “micro” VCSEL components and optical interconnect devices aimed at the emerging market for near-packaged optics (NPO) solutions.

PicoJool CEO-founder Al Yuen said: “Reaching 200G per lane proved that the performance is there. Our focus now is execution.

“This funding allows us to expand our teams in the US and Taiwan, qualify products with customers and move a complete portfolio from chip-level VCSELs and microVCSELs into AOC and NPO modules.

“We are building the connectivity platform customers will need for the next decade of AI infrastructure.”

GaAs advantage

Established by former Lumentum researcher Yuen less than two years ago, PicoJool initially raised $12 million in December 2025, thanks largely to support from Playground Global - the deep-tech venture investor set up by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.

And in June this year the startup introduced its first VCSEL products, saying that it could adapt the well-established technology to meet the bandwidth demands of modern AI infrastructure.

The firm’s high-bandwidth emitters are said to combine unique parallel optics and packaging innovations to deliver high performance at a cost that competes directly with copper at scale.

That includes integration of the optical chips into massively parallel pluggable modules targeting large-scale AI systems.

Underpinning that effort is a manufacturing partnership with the long-established compound semiconductor foundry WIN Semiconductor, which is a major producer of VCSELs for 3D sensing applications such as smart phone biometric security.

The VCSELs are fabricated on gallium arsenide (GaAs) epiwafers that do not suffer the same kind of supply constraints currently experienced by edge-emitting lasers based on indium phosphide (InP) wafers.

“By building on a GaAs supply chain that has already shipped billions of chips, Picojool has solved both sides of the equation: record bandwidth and the production scale to deliver it,” claimed Gelsinger back in June.

“That combination is what turns a lab achievement into an industry shift, creating a viable path from copper to optical at AI scale.”

High bandwidth

For the latest funding round, Playground was joined by lead investor Socratic Partners, which specializes in semiconductor investments and recently backed the optical modulator startup Polaris Electro-Optics.

"Moving data efficiently dictates how quickly and economically AI scales," said Greg Waters, one of the general partners at Socratic Partners with extensive experience in the compound semiconductor business as the former CEO of Skyworks Solutions.

“PicoJool combines a proven team with a unique approach that brings VCSEL technology's cost and manufacturing advantages to AI-scale bandwidth and power needs. They are poised to become a vital connectivity platform for next-generation data centers.”

Crucially, the 200G products from PicoJoool that are expected to enter a production ramp in early 2027 exceed 37GHz of bandwidth. The firm’s product portfolio also includes quad 100G, quad 200G and 32x50G NRZ microVCSEL configurations said to give customers multiple paths to 1.6T connectivity based on their bandwidth, power and system requirements.

“The network is the AI, and connectivity is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance,” pointed out Gelsinger. “The industry needs a solution that can increase bandwidth while sharply improving power and cost.

“PicoJool brings together breakthrough VCSEL performance, deep systems expertise and a manufacturing base capable of supporting tremendous scale. The team is well positioned to move quickly from an important technical milestone to products that can reshape how AI infrastructure moves data.”

The startup says it is also working with system companies and hyperscalers to define next-generation pluggable, NPO and co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions.