On April 26, 2022, Ayar Labs, the leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, announced that the company has secured $130 million in additional financing. The Series C round was led by Boardman Bay Capital Management. They join existing investors such as BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, Playground Global, and TechU Venture Partners. Other new financial investors participating in the round include Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Tyche Partners. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA entered this investment round, joining existing strategic investors Applied Ventures LLC, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati represented Ayar Labs on the transaction.

Ayar Labs’ optical I/O solution eliminates the bottlenecks associated with system bandwidth, power consumption, latency, and reach, dramatically improving existing system architectures and enabling new, previously unrealizable solutions for artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC), cloud, telecommunications, aerospace, and remote sensing applications. With the new investment, Ayar Labs is ramping production and securing supply chain partners, as signaled by previously announced multi-year strategic collaborations with Lumentum and Macom, both leaders in optical and photonic products, as well as GlobalFoundries on its new GF Fotonix platform.

The Wilson Sonsini team that advised Ayar Labs on the transaction included Julia Reigel, Melinda Douglass, Rowena Chen, Marianne Stark Bradley, and Joshua Gruenspecht.

For more information, please see Ayar Labs’ press release.