Semiconductor startup Volantis has raised $9 million in seed funding to advance its vision of photonically integrated computers tailored for AI workloads. The round includes backing from prominent tech figures including Alex Wang (Scale AI), Trevor Blackwell (Y Combinator), and an earlier check from Sam Altman in April 2022—long before AI’s current infrastructure bottlenecks came into sharper focus.
Volantis’ photonic architecture replaces traditional chip interconnects with high-efficiency optical channels, enabling much faster and lower-cost data movement across systems. This approach offers a potential leap in performance and efficiency over traditional silicon-based designs.
As AI models become increasingly complex, chip-to-chip communication is emerging as a major bottleneck. Volantis aims to tackle this by introducing a photonic compute platform that departs from conventional silicon photonics, which has struggled to scale effectively inside systems for two decades.
Instead of retrofitting current solutions, Volantis builds from the ground up using directly modulated lasers and wafer-scale integration. This novel setup mimics the architectural strengths of GPUs but applies them to optical communication—unlocking 15x better performance per dollar and significantly improving power efficiency.
“We’ve solved long-standing challenges that have kept photonics out of computers,” said Tapa Ghosh, Volantis’ founder and CEO. “Instead of relying on silicon photonics, we’ve scaled a new class of low-cost, low-power, directly modulated lasers and coupled them into densely parallel optical waveguides—something never done at this scale before.”
The new funds will support further development of Volantis’ chip architecture and help grow its expert engineering team. The company is also preparing to launch early customer engagements, signaling a move toward commercialization.
In just two years, Volantis has developed functional, patent-pending prototypes that validate its in-computer photonics approach. Unlike conventional systems where data must be shuttled between multiple chips, Volantis integrates photonics directly into the chip, enabling faster, more stable, and more power-efficient operations.
Founded in 2022, Volantis is based in San Mateo, California. The company brings together top optical and hardware engineers from leading firms such as Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, Marvell, Rockley, Infinera, and Juniper. Co-founder and CTO Roy Meade was the first employee and former VP of Engineering at Ayar Labs and led high-bandwidth memory development at Micron.
The team’s background positions Volantis to challenge traditional computing limits and build what the next decade of compute will demand.
The $9 million seed round was led by a group of respected tech leaders and innovators. Alex Wang and Trevor Blackwell joined the round, with Sam Altman having previously backed the company in 2022.
Clint Schow, a UCSB professor and expert in photonics who advises Volantis, remarked, “This new approach takes proven, low-cost VCSEL technology and unleashes it at scale to deliver a wafer-scale AI processor. Volantis is not trying to retrofit today’s chips; they’re building what the next decade of compute will require.”
