PicoJool, a company developing optical connectivity technology for AI infrastructure, has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding led by Socratic Partners, with participation from Hudson River Trading (HRT). The round follows a $12 million seed round led by Playground Global, bringing the company's total funding to $39.5 million.
PicoJool plans to use the funding to expand its teams and facilities in the U.S. and Taiwan as it brings its Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) and optical link products to market. VCSELs are a type of small semiconductor laser commonly used in high-speed data connections. The company plans to grow its research and development, operations, sales, and marketing teams, while building the capacity needed to qualify, manufacture, and support its products for hyperscale customers and data center operators.
Al Yuen, founder and CEO of PicoJool, said reaching 200G per lane, meaning 200 gigabits per second of data transfer speed on a single connection, proved that the performance is achievable, and that the company's focus now is execution. He said the funding lets PicoJool expand its teams in the U.S. and Taiwan, qualify products with customers, and move a complete product lineup from chip-level VCSELs and microVCSELs into active optical cable (AOC) and near-packaged optics (NPO) modules. He said the company is building the connectivity platform customers will need for the next decade of AI infrastructure.
AI computing clusters are increasing both the number of processors in a system and the volume of data moving between them, placing growing pressure on interconnect performance and data center power budgets. PicoJool is applying the cost and manufacturing advantages of VCSEL technology to a lineup of optical connectivity products designed to scale from 800G up through 1.6T, 3.2T, and beyond. The company says it's also seeing growing customer interest in its microVCSEL products, including a 50G NRZ configuration for optical compute interconnects and 64G NRZ/PAM4 configurations for PCIe 6.0-based NPO applications, and has begun early sampling of its chip-level VCSEL products ahead of wider availability.
PicoJool's product lineup includes high-speed VCSEL products at 100G and 200G, along with lower-power microVCSEL configurations at 50G NRZ and 64G NRZ/PAM4. The microVCSEL platform uses a massively parallel architecture, spreading data across many channels simultaneously, to increase total bandwidth while reducing the energy needed to move each bit of data, addressing a key constraint for hyperscale AI systems.
Greg Waters, general partner at Socratic Partners, said moving data efficiently determines how quickly and economically AI can scale. He said PicoJool combines a proven team with a distinctive approach that brings VCSEL technology's cost and manufacturing advantages to the bandwidth and power demands of AI-scale systems, positioning the company to become a vital connectivity platform for next-generation data centers.
This Series A round follows PicoJool's June unveiling of its 200G VCSEL and microVCSEL product family for scale-up AI data centers. The 200G products exceed 37GHz of bandwidth, and the broader portfolio includes quad 100G, quad 200G, and 32x50G NRZ microVCSEL configurations, giving customers multiple paths to reach 1.6T connectivity depending on their specific bandwidth, power, and system requirements.
Pat Gelsinger, general partner at Playground Global, said the network effectively is the AI, and that connectivity is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance. He said the industry needs a solution that can increase bandwidth while sharply improving power efficiency and cost, and that PicoJool combines breakthrough VCSEL performance, deep systems expertise, and a manufacturing base capable of supporting significant scale. He said the team is well positioned to move quickly from an important technical milestone to products that could reshape how AI infrastructure moves data.
PicoJool is working with WIN Semiconductor and other gallium arsenide (GaAs) foundries to prepare its 200G VCSELs for production. WIN has shipped more than one billion chips over the past decade, bringing substantial high-volume manufacturing experience to this work as PicoJool prepares its products for qualification and production. The company is also working with system companies and hyperscalers to help define next-generation pluggable, NPO, and co-packaged optics solutions.
