Celestial AI, a business focused on optical interconnectivity, raised $250 million in a Series C1 financing headed by Fidelity Management & Research Co. at a stated valuation of $2.5 billion.
The business secured a $175 million Series C headed by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund about a year prior to the new funding.
The photonic fabric technology from the Santa Clara, California-based business aids in separating memory and computation, speeding up the processing of complex AI and enabling more energy-efficient computing.
latest investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, participated in the latest round.Along with involvement from current investors AMD Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Temasek Holdings, Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund, Porsche Automobil Holding, and Engine Ventures, there will also be participation from Maverick Silicon, Tiger Global Management, and Lip-Bu Tan.
Large sums of money
Since its founding in 2020, Celestial AI has raised over $515 million, according to the business.
The company’s photonic fabric aids in resolving a major problem with generative AI: separating memory and processing power to increase the technology’s efficiency.
According to a statement from CEO David Lazovsky, “the requirements on AI infrastructure are compounding with the emergence of complex reasoning models and agentic AI.
“”To manage massive data transfers between processors, cluster sizes must scale from a few AI processors in a server to tens of processors in a single rack and thousands of processors across multiple racks, all while relying on high-bandwidth, low-latency network connectivity.”
Chips appear to be the topic of tech right now because of AI. Tiger Global led a more than $100 million Series B funding round for EnCharge AI, a business that develops analog in-memory computing AI circuits, only last month.