Avicena Raises $25M in Series A to Fund Development of High Capacity microLED-based Optical Interconnects

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AvicenaTech Corp., the leader in microLED-based chip-to-chip interconnects, announced that the company has secured $25M in Series A funding from Samsung Catalyst Fund, Cerberus Capital Management, Clear Ventures, and Micron Ventures to drive the development of products based on Avicena’s breakthrough photonic I/O solution.

“We believe that Avicena technology can be transformational in unlocking compute-to-memory chip-to-chip high-speed interconnects. Such technology can be central to supporting future disaggregated architectures and distributed high-performance computing (HPC) systems,” said Marco Chisari, EVP of Samsung Electronics and Head of the Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center.

“We are excited to participate in this round at Avicena,” said Amir Salek, Senior Managing Director at Cerberus Capital Management and former Head of Silicon for Google Infrastructure and Cloud. “Avicena has a highly differentiated technology addressing one of the main challenges in modern computer architecture. The technology offered by Avicena meets the needs for scaling future HPC and cloud compute networks and covers applications in conventional datacenter and 5G cellular networking.”

Avicena’s LightBundleTM I/O solution eliminates the existing bottlenecks of copper links triggered by power consumption, latency, reach and bandwidth density thus dramatically improving existing system performance. This enables new, dramatically higher-performing architectures in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud computing, next generation cellular radio, remote sensing, and aerospace applications.

The groundbreaking LightBundleTM technology is based on arrays of GaN micro-emitters that leverage the microLED display ecosystem and can be integrated onto any high-performance CMOS IC. Avicena leverages recent advances in the display industry to enable high volume, low-cost production of highly optimized microLED arrays.

“Avicena’s differentiated interconnect technology promises to enable next-generation high-performance processor and memory clusters,” said Gayathri Radhakrishnan, Senior Director at Micron Ventures. “Avicena represents a strategic investment opportunity for Micron Technology to support innovation in HPC architectures with our partners and customers.”

“We are excited about closing our Series A funding with a distinguished group of existing and new investors,” said Bardia Pezeshki, Founder and CEO of Avicena. “We will use the new funds to scale our team and build initial products for our growing family of partners and customers.”