Celestial AI, a developer specializing in optical interconnect technology, has successfully raised $100 million in a series B funding round for its innovative Photonic Fabric technology platform. The investment was led by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund. Other notable participants included Samsung Catalyst, Smart Global Holdings (SGH), Porsche Automobil Holding SE, The Engine Fund, ImecXpand, M Ventures, and Tyche Partners. With this funding, Celestial AI has accumulated a total of $165 million from seed funding to series B.

Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric platform represents a significant breakthrough in optical connectivity performance, surpassing existing technologies. The company has collaborated with hyper scalers, AI computing, and memory providers to develop the Photonic Fabric, which addresses the limitations of electrical interconnects, such as restricted bandwidth, high latency, and high power consumption. By leveraging its proprietary Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) technology, Celestial AI enables scalable data center memory disaggregation and accelerated computing.

Dave Lazovsky, CEO of Celestial AI, explained that the key challenge in advancing large language models (LLMs) and recommendation engine workloads lies in memory capacity, bandwidth, and data movement. The Photonic Fabric technology allows for the integration of photonics directly into silicon die, delivering data at any point on the die to the point of computing. With its high bandwidth (1.8 Tbps/mm²) and low latency, the platform offers fully photonic compute-to-compute and compute-to-memory links, supporting industry-standard protocols like CXL and JEDEC (HBM), as well as interfaces such as PCIe and UCIe.

Celestial AI’s recent funding round has attracted the interest of Broadcom, which is collaborating with the company on the development of Photonic Fabric prototypes based on Celestial AI’s designs. The prototypes are expected to be ready for shipment to customers within the next 18 months. Lazovsky emphasized that as data rates increase within data centers, electrical interconnects encounter issues such as signal fidelity loss and limited bandwidth, hindering system throughput. The low latency data transmission of Photonic Fabric enables the connection and disaggregation of a significantly higher number of servers, making it possible to utilize remote memory for latency-sensitive applications.

By simplifying enterprise computation for LLMs and deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs), Photonic Fabric allows processors to store and process larger chunks of data, reducing the number of processors needed and increasing system efficiency. The funding will be utilized to accelerate the productization and commercialization of the Photonic Fabric technology platform by expanding Celestial AI’s engineering, sales, and technical marketing teams. Lazovsky expects the company’s headcount to grow by about 30% by the end of 2023, reaching 130 employees. Celestial AI aims to shape the future of AI model progress and adoption by breaking through the memory wall and improving system efficiencies, enabling businesses to adopt LLMs more rapidly and unlock new applications and use cases.

By Impact Lab