Venture funding finishes 2024 with familiar themes

Venture funding finishes 2024 with familiar themes

In a fitting end to 2024, the headline venture funding for December was in the space of optical interconnects for datacenters and AI clusters, an area that dominated photonics venture funding all year (see the October, September, and March Photonics VC Updates).

In December, San Jose, California-based Ayar Labs, one of the older startups within the field, raised a $155M Series D round at a $1B+ post-money valuation. The deal was co-led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital, with participation by a large group of new and existing investors including AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, NVIDIA, and 3M Ventures.

In November, we discussed another approach to address the AI-led explosion of computing requirements—direct computing in optics (see the November Photonics VC Update). In December, Fremont, California-based Opticore raised a $5M seed round to develop photonic logic based on photoelectric multiplication in coherent detection, with a goal of enabling computations with lower energy costs and higher clock speeds compared to graphic processing units (GPUs). The round was co-led by Sagax Capital and Jetha Global.

Quantum computing also continued its run of significant funding announcements (see the August, September, and October Photonics VC Updates), with Quantum Brilliance announcing a USD $20M Series A round led by Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corp., Breakthrough Victoria, Main Sequence, Intervalley Ventures, and In-Q-Tel. The Australian company is using point defects within synthetic diamonds to act as qubits that can be initialized and read out optically. The company’s goal is to enable small, ruggedized quantum processors that operate at room temperature.

Finally, PhotoniCare, a medical device company in North Carolina, raised a $4.6M Series B led by Gentex Corp. for its middle-ear scope based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) high-resolution depth imaging.

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