Computer Hardware Startup Xscape Photonics Mints $44 Million in Series A funding, bringing total funds raised to $57 million. IAG Capital Partners led the series with the participation of Altair, Cisco Investments, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, NVIDIA, and OUP.
Xscape will use the funds to accelerate the development of its ChromX platform, which is a scalable, multi-color, programmable photonics platform for AI data center fabrics.
This 2022 startup was co-founded by Vivek Raghunathan (CEO), Alexander Gaeta (President), Yoshi Okawachi (Head of R&D – Laser), Michal Lipson, and Keren Bergman. It uses silicon photonics to support the next generation of AI data centers.
“Historically, performance and scalability challenges have been addressed by building bigger data centers to train large language models. This approach is not sustainable and unlocks a myriad of additional issues around energy consumption and cost,” said Vivek. “At Xscape Photonics, we are on a mission to help our customers completely reimagine how they solve these challenges. This funding validates our mission and positions us for future growth to support next-generation AI data centers.”
According to a report by IDC, AI-driven workloads will account for over 20% of the energy consumption in large-scale data centers by 2025, especially as AI training becomes more common. With this growth occurring at such a rapid rate, AI data centers struggle to meet the energy efficiency, performance, and scalability requirements needed to support the age of AI.
“The performance scaling challenges are centered on the fundamental problem of “escape bandwidth” that results in a key bottleneck for AI workloads,” said Keren.
“We see tremendous value in the technology that Xscape Photonics is developing to solve challenges customers are facing with AI data center energy usage and bandwidth performance,” said Alex Kash, Associate at IAG Capital Partners. “The future of the data center will be built around photonics and this capital will help to dramatically accelerate Xscape Photonics’ product development.”
Data centers have traditionally been constrained to transmit data streams over four colors on a single fiber. However, as bandwidth demand has grown, the need for a scalable laser and photonics platform becomes essential as vendors are unable to keep up with the surge in volume demand for lasers in these networks. Xscape Photonics’ multi-wavelength photonics platform can handle hundreds of colors on a single fiber, providing flexibility and efficiency for AI workloads. With its ChromX platform, Xscape Photonics is enabling hyper-scale customers to reimagine the data center fabric by utilizing a scalable solution that can hit volume, cost, and density targets.
“We are excited about accelerating commercialization of our unique multi-color laser photonics technology, for different custom use cases in the AI and hyperscaler markets,” said Alexander.
