Xscape Photonics raises $44 million for AI datacentre fabrics
The company says its ChromX platform is a scalable platform that can handle hundreds of colours on a single fibre, providing flexibility and efficiency for AI workloads
Xscape Photonics, a startup using silicon photonics to support the next generation of AI datacentres, has announced the successful close of a $44 million Series A funding round, increasing the total amount raised to $57 million. The financing was led by IAG Capital Partners with investment from Altair, Cisco Investments, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, NVIDIA and OUP. Xscape Photonics says it will use the funding to accelerate the development of its ChromX platform, a scalable, multi-colour, programmable photonics platform for AI datacentre fabrics.
“Historically, performance and scalability challenges have been addressed by building bigger datacentres to train large language models,” said Vivek Raghunathan, co-founder and CEO of Xscape Photonics. “This approach is not sustainable and unlocks a myriad of additional issues around energy consumption and cost. 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 datacentres.”
According to a report by IDC, AI-driven workloads will account for over 20 percent of the energy consumption in large-scale datacentres by 2025, especially as AI training becomes more common. With this growth occurring at such a rapid rate, AI datacentres struggle to meet the energy efficiency, performance and scalability requirements needed to support the age of AI.
“The performance scaling challenges are centred on the fundamental problem of “escape bandwidth” that results in a key bottleneck for AI workloads,” explained Keren Bergman, co-founder of Xscape Photonics.
Alex Kash, associate at IAG Capital Partners, said: “We see tremendous value in the technology that Xscape Photonics is developing to solve challenges customers are facing with AI datacentre energy usage and bandwidth performance. The future of the datacentre will be built around photonics and this capital will help to dramatically accelerate Xscape Photonics’ product development.”
Datacentres have traditionally been constrained to transmit data streams over four colours on a single fibre. However, as bandwidth demand has grown, the need for a scalable laser and photonics platform has become essential as vendors are unable to keep up with the surge in volume demand for lasers in these networks. According to Xscape Photonics, its multi-wavelength photonics platform can handle hundreds of colours on a single fibre, providing flexibility and efficiency for AI workloads. With its ChromX platform, the company says it is enabling hyperscale customers to reimagine the datacentre fabric by utilising a scalable solution that can hit volume, cost and density targets.
Alexander Gaeta, co-founder and president of Xscape Photonics, said: “We are excited about accelerating commercialisation of our unique multi-colour laser photonics technology, for different custom use cases in the AI and hyperscaler markets.”
