Lumilens has emerged from stealth with a portfolio of optical interconnect products targeting two networking constraints in large AI clusters: scale-out connectivity between racks and scale-up connectivity among GPUs within a compute domain.
The company said it has begun shipping its first scale-out product to production AI data centers for a hyperscale customer under a multi-billion-dollar agreement. Lumilens also announced over $700 million in Series C funding, co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures, and Spark Capital. The round values the company at $5.51 billion and brings total funding to more than $900 million.
Lumilens was founded in early 2024 and is positioning its technology around the growing role of networking in AI infrastructure design. As GPU cluster sizes grow, network bandwidth, optical component availability, power consumption, and cabling density are becoming primary constraints alongside accelerator supply.
At the scale-out layer, large GPU deployments require many optical transceivers and fiber connections. Lumilens cited an estimated need for more than 2.4 million transceivers and more than five million fiber strands for a 400,000-GPU data center. The company also pointed to McKinsey projections that 800G optical transceiver production could fall 40 to 60 percent short of demand through 2027, with 1.6T shortfalls of 30 to 40 percent through 2029.
Within the rack, Lumilens is addressing scale-up networks, where tightly coupled GPUs have historically used short-reach copper electrical links. Signal integrity limits the practical reach of those connections to roughly 1.5 meters at AI data rates, generally constraining scale-up fabrics to a single rack. Extending these domains across larger GPU counts requires optical I/O closer to the compute silicon.
The Lumilens product portfolio includes near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO) for scale-up systems, plus 800G and 1.6T pluggable optical transceivers for scale-out fabrics. The scale-up products move optical interfaces near or alongside GPU packages, replacing longer electrical paths and enabling larger, more tightly coupled compute domains.
The company’s scale-out modules target rack-to-rack and cluster-level links, where high-bandwidth optics replace copper connections at greater distances while reducing power and cabling constraints. Lumilens said its roadmap extends beyond 1.6T optics but did not disclose specific product availability dates or interface specifications.
Lumilens builds its products on a platform it calls LumiCore, which combines silicon photonics, mixed-signal ICs, electrical-optical interposers, and optical systems. The company said it develops these elements internally to improve design control and shorten customer qualification cycles.
Manufacturing is central to the company’s strategy. Lumilens said it developed an electrical-optical interposer to simplify photonic-chip assembly, supported by proprietary process recipes, robotics, and automated test systems. Production is expected to scale through manufacturing partners and Lumilens-operated facilities.
Founder and CEO Ankur Singla said hyperscale operators need both increased optical capacity for existing AI fabrics and a path toward clusters that directly connect thousands of GPUs. “The constraint on AI has shifted from how many GPUs you can buy to how many you can connect,” Singla said. Lumilens is targeting both requirements with a unified approach spanning pluggable optics, silicon photonics, and optical system integration.
The new funding will support expansion across silicon development, systems, software, process engineering, and high-volume manufacturing operations. Lumilens said its team includes personnel with experience from Cisco, Juniper Networks, Meta, Marvell, Lumentum, and Coherent. Singla previously founded Contrail Systems, acquired by Juniper Networks, and Volterra, acquired by F5. Co-founder and CTO Ted Schmidt was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper.
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