❯ Volantis raises an $88 million Series A to link AI chips to pooled memory with light

Memory out of reachVolantis is based in San Francisco and wants to solve the problem of AI chips being unable to reach enough memory. According to Runtime Wire, it uses optical waveguides and micro lasers to connect processors to shared memory chips. Electrical signals travel only millimeters inside a package, while its optical links can travel more than 200 millimeters at under one picojoule per bit, so one processor can reach far more memory.

People from Micron and Ayar LabsCEO Tapabrata Ghosh previously co-founded Vathys. CTO Roy Meade led Micron’s HBM (high-bandwidth memory) program and was a vice president at optical interconnect company Ayar Labs. The company emerged from stealth in June 2025 with a $9 million seed round.

A-1 arrives in 2027The Series A announced on October 1 totals $88 million, co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic and Susa Ventures participating, for $97 million in total funding. Its first product, A-1, is a photonic inference system with first customer deliveries planned for 2027, targeting models of more than 20 trillion parameters and up to 10,000 tokens per second per user.

The numbers are still targetsThose performance figures describe a system that has not shipped. The chip has been taped out but not yet evaluated in silicon. If it works, AI accelerators could reach larger and cheaper pools of shared memory, which is the core story the company tells investors. Until the product is delivered, it remains a design to be proven.

▪ SIGNALThe bottleneck in AI hardware has moved from compute to memory, and startups are not trying to build better memory but to let chips use memory that is farther away and cheaper.