Volantis Unveils Photonic Compute Platform for the AI Era; Raises $9M in Seed Round With Alex Wang, Trevor Blackwell, and Others

Business Wire

2 days ago

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Volantis, a semiconductor startup building photonically integrated computers for the AI era, today emerged from stealth and announced a $9 million seed round of funding. The round includes backing from Alex Wang (Scale AI) and Trevor Blackwell (Y Combinator). Sam Altman backed Volantis in April 2022, betting on the need for foundational breakthroughs in compute long before today's AI infrastructure limitations came into focus.
Volantis is not trying to retrofit today's chips; they're building what the next decade of compute will require.
Founded in 2022, Volantis is the first company to scale a new class of photonic compute architecture that moves beyond the limitations of silicon photonics. Using a fundamentally different approach—direct laser modulation and wafer-scale integration—Volantis enables ultra-efficient communication across highly connected compute systems. This architecture packs the power of a server rack into a chip-scale package, reducing energy consumption and cost while dramatically increasing compute speed.
'We're not just making an incrementally better AI chip,' said Tapa Ghosh, Volantis' founder and CEO. 'We've solved long-standing challenges that have kept photonics out of computers. Instead of relying on silicon photonics, we've scaled a new class of low-cost, low-power, directly modulated lasers and coupled them into densely parallel optical waveguides—something never done at this scale before. The result is the photonic compute platform the AI era has been waiting for.'
The core bottleneck in AI compute today is the bandwidth and power required to move data between chips. While photonics has long been seen as the answer, silicon photonics—the dominant approach for the past two decades—has consistently failed to scale inside systems. Volantis replaces traditional chip interconnects with energy-efficient optical channels, using parallelism to deliver high aggregate bandwidth with unmatched efficiency.
Volantis' breakthrough comes from integrating directly modulated lasers with on-chip optical waveguides—a feat that enables many slow, low-powered links to work in parallel, similar to the architectural advantage GPUs have in compute. This unique combination allows Volantis to unlock 15x better performance per dollar while improving stability, and reducing power consumption. In just two years Volantis has already built working, patent-pending prototypes, validating that photonics inside the computer outperforms traditional silicon photonics.
Clint Schow, a leading photonics researcher and professor at UCSB, and advisor to Volantis, added, 'This new approach takes proven, low-cost VCSEL technology and unleashes it at scale to deliver a wafer-scale AI processor. Volantis is not trying to retrofit today's chips; they're building what the next decade of compute will require.'
The Volantis team brings together top optical and hardware engineering talent from companies like Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, Marvell, Rockley, Infinera, Lumentum, Juniper, Skorpios, and others. Roy Meade, co-founder and CTO of Volantis, was the first employee and former VP of Engineering at Ayar Labs, one of the most prominent silicon photonics companies globally; he also successfully led HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) development at Micron.
Volantis will use the funding to continue refining its chip architecture, grow its world-class engineering team, and begin early customer engagements.
About Volantis
Volantis is a semiconductor startup building photonically integrated computers for the AI era. Founded in 2022 and backed by leading innovators in AI and computing, Volantis is the first to scale photonics inside computer chips, enabling a new class of chips that are radically faster, less expensive, and more energy efficient than traditional architectures. Volantis holds multiple pending patents on its architecture and is headquartered in San Mateo, CA.