AI Inference Memory-Wall Breaker Volantis Raises $88M Series A

Money and M&A are both pouring into optical interconnects at once. Ayar Labs has grown its 2026 funding total to $650 million, and NVIDIA poured $6.5 billion into photonics in just three months. Now Volantis has joined the pack with an $88 million Series A.

The problem Volantis is trying to solve is the AI “memory wall.” Running giant AI models fast requires two things at once: enough memory capacity to hold the entire model, and enough memory bandwidth to keep feeding that data to the compute chip without a bottleneck. Until now, those two have traded off against each other. Chips built around on-chip SRAM get high bandwidth but limited capacity; GPUs and TPUs built around HBM get high capacity but comparatively low bandwidth.

Volantis says it can break that trade-off with optics. Instead of keeping lasers external to the chip, the company built custom, integrated micro-VCSELs directly into its silicon, and it ditched traditional optical fiber for a new structure that pushes bandwidth density higher. Because its design pools memory across chips, it can lean on cheaper memory while still raising throughput, which the company says drives cost per token down too. The goal is to run models with more than 10 trillion parameters at up to 10,000 tokens per second per user — fast enough, the company says, to turn a 30-minute coding-agent task into a 30-second one.

Founder and CEO Tapa Ghosh built a quadcopter as a teenager to research collision-avoidance deep learning, later became a Thiel Fellow and went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch, and previously founded chip startup Vathys before Volantis. Co-founder and CTO Roy Meade led HBM development at Micron and was Ayar Labs’ first employee and VP of Engineering. Along with the rest of the founding team, the two built a string of industry firsts at NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and Ayar Labs — the first CoWoS product, the first silicon-photonics co-packaged optics systems, and the first high-volume tunable VCSELs.

The $88 million round was co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract, with participation from John Doerr. Its angel roster is notable too: Sam Altman, Google’s Jeff Dean, and SemiAnalysis’s Dylan Patel all put money in. The round brings Volantis’s total funding to $97 million.

The Competition

Optical interconnects have become a battleground where big checks and big acquisitions are landing at the same time. Ayar Labs, backed by NVIDIA as an investor, embeds optical engines directly inside chip packages so racks can exchange data using light. It has grown its 2026 funding total to $650 million. Lightmatter takes a more radical approach, integrating multiple chips onto a single optical layer through its Passage interposer, and raised a $400 million Series D at a $4.4 billion valuation. Celestial AI built a “Photonic Fabric” to replace rack-level GPU-to-GPU links with optics, but semiconductor giant Marvell completed its $3.25 billion acquisition of the company this February, ending its run as an independent competitor — one more sign that large chipmakers are choosing to buy their way into photonics rather than build it themselves.