PicoJool raises $27.5m
Funding will support the commercialisation of PicoJool’s 200G VCSELs and MicroVCSELs for high-bandwidth AI optical interconnects.
PicoJool has raised $27.5 million in a Series A funding round to accelerate the development and commercialisation of its VCSEL and optical connectivity technologies for AI data centres.
The round was led by Socratic Partners, with participation from Hudson River Trading, bringing PicoJool’s total funding to $39.5 million. The company said the investment will support expansion of its US and Taiwan operations, as well as product qualification, manufacturing and customer support.
PicoJool is developing high-speed VCSELs operating at 100G and 200G per lane, alongside lower-power MicroVCSEL products including 50G NRZ and 64G NRZ/PAM4 configurations. Its 200G devices deliver more than 37GHz of bandwidth and are designed to support optical connectivity scaling from 800G to 1.6T, 3.2T and beyond.
The company is also targeting emerging optical architectures including active optical cables (AOCs), near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO). Its MicroVCSEL platform uses a massively parallel architecture to increase aggregate bandwidth while reducing energy consumption per bit.
PicoJool has begun early sampling of its chip-level VCSEL products and is working with WIN Semiconductor and other GaAs foundries to prepare its 200G VCSELs for production. The company is also collaborating with system companies and hyperscalers on next-generation pluggable, NPO and CPO solutions.
