Ayar Labs lights up $24m series A

Ayar Labs, a US-based semiconductor technology developer based on research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, raised $24m in a series A round on Wednesday led by venture fund and incubator Playground Capital.
Semiconductor manufacturing company GlobalFoundries and chipmaker Intel’s corporate venturing arm Intel Capital also contributed to the round, as did VC firm Founders Fund.
Founded in 2015, Ayar Labs has developed a silicon chip that uses fibre optics to transmit data rather than the current copper pins and wires. The technology offers 10 times more bandwidth while reducing power consumption by the same factor.
The chip was developed by Rajeev Ram and Vladimir Stojanovic at MIT – though Stojanovic is now with University of California, Berkeley – and Milos Popovic, who was at CU Boulder at the time but has since joined Boston University.
They were assisted by PhD researchers Chen Sun at MIT and Mark Wade at Colorado.
The series A funding will enable Ayar Labs to drive the commercialisation of its chip.
Ayar Labs previously closed a $2.5m seed round in 2016 led by FF Science, a seed-stage investment arm of Founders Fund, and also featured TechU Angels.
– A version of this article first appeared on our sister site, Global Corporate Venturing.