PicoJool, a Palo Alto company making the lasers that carry data between chips in AI data centers, has raised a $27.5 million Series A led by Socratic Partners, with Hudson River Trading participating.

The round brings total funding to $39.5 million, including a $12 million seed. The company is led by CEO Al Yuen.

Lasers, Not Copper

PicoJool builds vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, or VCSELs, and smaller microVCSELs, the light sources behind optical links inside data centers.

Its products run from 50G to 200G per lane, with a roadmap the company says scales to 1.6T and beyond. Its 200G parts exceed 37GHz of bandwidth.

"Reaching 200G per lane proved that the performance is there. Our focus now is execution," Yuen said.

Where the Money Goes

PicoJool plans to expand teams and facilities in the United States and Taiwan, grow research, operations, sales and marketing, and build manufacturing capacity for product qualification and customer support.

Manufacturing is done with partner WIN Semiconductor, which the company notes has shipped more than a billion chips over the past decade.

HPCwire reported the raise as funding to scale optical connectivity for AI infrastructure.

Why Optics

As AI clusters grow, moving data between accelerators becomes as much of a constraint as the accelerators themselves. Electrical links over copper run into limits on reach, bandwidth and power, which has pushed the industry toward optical connections at ever shorter distances.

"Moving data efficiently dictates how quickly and economically AI scales," said Greg Waters, general partner at Socratic Partners.

Why It Matters

Optical interconnect has become one of the more crowded corners of AI infrastructure, with startups and established component makers all chasing the same hyperscaler qualification cycles.

PicoJool's position is at the light source rather than the full interconnect system, a component business where qualification and yield decide the winners. Hudson River Trading's participation is notable: the trading firm runs some of the most latency-sensitive infrastructure in finance.

Source

Business Wire — "PicoJool Raises $27.5 Million Series A to Scale Optical Connectivity for AI Infrastructure"