Optical Interconnect Chip Company Volantis Completes $88 Million Series A Funding Round

Optical interconnect chip company Volantis announced on X the completion of an $88 million Series A funding round. The company stated that it is addressing the AI memory bottleneck with optical solutions, equipping chips with large amounts of high-speed memory and increasing single-chip memory bandwidth and capacity by several orders of magnitude, to support high-speed inference for models exceeding 10 trillion parameters, with single-user speeds reaching up to 10,000 tokens per second. Volantis noted that the solution will initially be used to accelerate agents, reducing programming-related tasks from hours to minutes or seconds. The company also stated that its optical approach can scale memory systems by orders of magnitude per generation, rather than roughly 2x annually. Its team has previously worked on the first CoWoS product, early HBM, the first silicon photonic CPO system, the first mass-produced tunable VCSELs, and the first processors communicating directly with light; it has already achieved transmission distances within chip packaging exceeding 10 times that of equivalent tiny electrical wires, with next-generation products already taped out, targeting bandwidth density records at relevant distances.