CScale Exits Stealth With $145 Million to Build the Interconnect for Gigawatt-Scale AI
CScale, building an integrated light engine to deliver reliable optical connectivity for AI infrastructure at gigawatt scale, led by Martin Lund, Sanjai Kohli, and the team, has exited stealth, announcing $145 million in Series C funding to accelerate development and commercialization of optical interconnect for AI scale-up, the high-bandwidth, ultra-low-latency connections that let accelerators work together like a single, much larger computer. The round brings the company’s total funding to $188 million. The round was led by Atreides Management, together with Valor Equity Partners, Premji Invest joined as co-lead. Sutter Hill Ventures, which has backed CScale since its inception, continued its support alongside existing investor Maverick Silicon. NVIDIA and Intel Capital joined as CScale’s first strategic investors.
In gigawatt-scale AI data centers, thousands of accelerators across dozens of racks will require high-bandwidth, low-latency, and continuous communication. At this scale, even rare optical link failures can become recurring fleet-level events that disrupt compute. CScale is designing its interconnect architecture to isolate and contain optical failures without interrupting ongoing workloads.
“As AI scale-up domains extend across dozens of racks, optical interconnect becomes essential,” said Martin Lund, CEO of CScale. “At that scale, reliable, predictable communication is fundamental to system economics. Easier part replacement improves serviceability, not continuity. We’re designing the interconnect for continuity. Lasers will fail. Compute shouldn’t.”
“AI infrastructure is no longer just a compute problem. It is a systems problem,” said Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Atreides Management. “As scale-up systems move toward gigawatt-class deployments, interconnect bandwidth means nothing without system reliability. Every optical failure is a compute failure. At this scale, failures are not hypothetical — they are inevitable. CScale is designing reliable scale-up optics for next-generation AI factories, unlocking the full performance of optics without tradeoffs.”
“CScale’s strength is its architectural judgment: understanding which technical choices create value for the entire system. The team combines deep expertise across photonics, electronics, and software with the deployment experience to turn optical capability into dependable AI infrastructure,” said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest. “At Premji Invest, we partner with teams that think big and have the discipline to build enduring companies, and CScale is exactly that. We are proud to co-lead this financing and support CScale as they bring transformative solutions to market.”
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