Lumilens, an optical data center connectivity startup founded by a former Aruba CTO, emerged from stealth with more than $900 million in total funding and a $5.5 billion valuation.
The firm was founded in 2024 by Ankur Singla and joins a growing cohort of upstarts working to replace copper cables with light inside AI data centers. The likes of Bain Capital Ventures, Atreides Management, and Qualcomm Ventures backed Lumilens.
Singla, a Cisco and F5 alum who founded the Juniper-acquired firm Contrail Systems, said Lumilens aims to manufacture interconnect technologies at the “volume, quality, and pace” the AI buildout requires.
“The constraint on AI has shifted from how many GPUs (graphics processing units) you can buy to how many you can connect," Singla noted. "Whether they're training frontier models or serving them to hundreds of millions of users, hyperscalers told us they need the same two things: far more optical capacity for the networks they run today, and a path to directly connecting thousands of GPUs together into a single cluster.”
Lumilens is developing tech covering full data center connectivity, including near-package and co-packaged optics (NPO/CPO) for scale-up networking and optical modules for scale-out. The startup designs its own silicon and claims that in the two years since its founding, its initial scale-out product has finished qualification and started shipping into an unnamed hyperscaler’s live AI data centers.
Amid an influx of optical interconnectivity startups, Lumilens touts its LumiCore technology platform as a differentiator. It spans in-house developed silicon photonics, mixed-signal integrated circuits, electrical-optical interposers, and optical systems, with Lumilens claiming each is designed for high-volume manufacturing “from day one.”
Lumilens said it has poached executives and engineers from Meta, Coherent, and Cisco. CTO Ted Schmidt was formerly senior director for silicon photonics at Lumentum, while product VP Samuel Liu held product management leadership roles in Nokia’s IP optics team, at Marvell, and at Singla’s former employer, Juniper Networks.
“Connecting GPUs is the bottleneck now, and copper has hit a wall the industry can't engineer around,” Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield, explained. “Lumilens designs and manufactures optical interconnects for both the scale-up and scale-out of AI infrastructure, and treats manufacturing as a product in its own right, from chip assembly to high-volume production. In Mayfield’s 56-year history, we've never seen execution and growth like this – a $5-plus billion valuation and multibillions in orders – in two years.” Lumilens finds itself among an already crowded field. Just this week, Arm and one of Netflix’s co-founders backed rival startup Olix, founded by Thiel Foundation fellow and 25-year-old British entrepreneur James Dacombe.
There’s also Ayar Labs, which enjoys backing from both Nvidia and AMD, and is among the partners signed up to the former’s NVLink Fusion scale-up-centric backplane.
Other potential rivals for Lumilens include Lumentum, Lightmatter, and Xscape Photonics, while the big semiconductor firms are working behind the scenes on complementing copper interconnects with CPO. Nvidia’s CPO switches, for example, are due to drop later this year, while AMD CEO Lisa Su recently confirmed its 2027 GPU line will cater to both copper and optical connectivity.