March 2025 deals were headlined by another large AI compute interconnect deal as Celestial AI (Santa Clara, CA) raised a $250M Series C1 at a $2.5B valuation. Fidelity Management & Research led with BlackRock, Maverick Silicon, Tiger Global Management, and Lip-Bu Tan, as well as several previous investors participating. The company is focused on optical scale-up networks for accelerated computing leveraging silicon photonics and advanced packaging.
Also focused on interconnecting AI compute, CamGraPhIC (Cambridge, U.K.), a startup developing graphene-based transceivers, raised €25M ($27.9M) in Series A funding led by CDP Venture Capital and joined by several others including NATO Innovation Fund and Sony Innovation Fund.
Finally, Zero Point Motion (Bristol, U.K.) closed a £4M ($5.1M) pre-Series A funding round from SCVC, Foresight Group, and Verve Ventures to combine silicon photonics and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) for low-cost and low-noise accelerometers and gyroscopes, a quickly growing area of interest for investment.
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.