San Francisco-based semiconductor startup Volantis has secured $88 million in a Series A funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $97 million. The round was co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with participation from John Doerr and VXI Capital. This follows a $9 million seed round in 2025.
The company aims to address AI inference bottlenecks by replacing traditional electrical connections between compute chips and memory with photonic interconnects. Volantis utilizes custom micro-VCSEL technology to create optical links, allowing a single GPU to connect to as many as 220 memory chips, compared to the standard 8.
Led by CEO Tapa Ghosh, the team includes veterans from NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and Ayar Labs. The startup plans to begin delivering its A-1 integrated inference engines to customers by 2027, focusing on improving memory access efficiency rather than raw processing power.
