Photonics VC Update is a monthly series to brief scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders about the venture funding of emerging companies in various photonics technologies.
To ensure Photonics VC Update includes your venture capital funding announcement, please send it to [email protected], with “Photonics VC Update” in the subject line.
In a fitting end to 2024, the headline venture funding for December was in the space of optical interconnects for datacenters and AI clusters, an area that dominated photonics venture funding all year (see the October, September, and March Photonics VC Updates).
In December, San Jose, California-based Ayar Labs, one of the older startups within the field, raised a $155M Series D round at a $1B+ post-money valuation. The deal was co-led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital, with participation by a large group of new and existing investors including AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, NVIDIA, and 3M Ventures.
In November, we discussed another approach to address the AI-led explosion of computing requirements—direct computing in optics (see the November Photonics VC Update). In December, Fremont, California-based Opticore raised a $5M seed round to develop photonic logic based on photoelectric multiplication in coherent detection, with a goal of enabling computations with lower energy costs and higher clock speeds compared to graphic processing units (GPUs). The round was co-led by Sagax Capital and Jetha Global.
Quantum computing also continued its run of significant funding announcements (see the August, September, and October Photonics VC Updates), with Quantum Brilliance announcing a USD $20M Series A round led by Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corp., Breakthrough Victoria, Main Sequence, Intervalley Ventures, and In-Q-Tel. The Australian company is using point defects within synthetic diamonds to act as qubits that can be initialized and read out optically. The company’s goal is to enable small, ruggedized quantum processors that operate at room temperature.
Finally, PhotoniCare, a medical device company in North Carolina, raised a $4.6M Series B led by Gentex Corp. for its middle-ear scope based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) high-resolution depth imaging.
Eric Hall
Eric Hall is a managing partner of Entrada Ventures, a seed-stage fund investing in innovative technologies. He has worked alongside multiple Nobel Prize winners in building successful startups across various photonics technologies, including Aurrion (silicon photonics), Soraa (GaN LEDs), Kaai (GaN lasers), and Agility Communications (InP photonics), leading to multiple acquisitions. Subsequently, Hall led several transactions as an investment banker at Golding Partners before moving into early-stage investing. He earned his Bachelor of Science in engineering physics at UC Berkeley, a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Columbia Business School, and a PhD in materials at UC Santa Barbara.