A $100 million Series B financing headed by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund was announced by Celestial AI on Wednesday.
The additional funding, which increases Celestial AI’s total amount collected to more than $165 million, will be applied to expanding the company’s engineering, sales, and technical marketing divisions in order to assist the development of Celestial’s photonics platform. Currently, Celestial employs about 100 people, but founder Lazovsky predicts that figure will increase to 130 by the end of the year.
Technology experts David Lazovsky and Preet Virk, who have backgrounds in semiconductor engineering and photonics, realized several years ago that workloads for AI and machine learning would quickly run into a data movement problem. They projected that if AI models became larger than what could be stored on the die of any one memory chip, it would get harder to transfer data to and from computational devices.
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They came up with an optical interconnect technique for compute-to-compute, compute-to-memory, and on-chip data transmission, which was designed by Phil Winterbottom, a former researcher at the prestigious Bell Labs. Lazovsky, Virk, and Winterbottom established Celestial AI as a firm to market the technology. The startup is now attracting significant investors.
“Compute and memory are now tightly connected,” Lazovsky said. “Whether the additional compute is required or not, the only method to add more high bandwidth memory is to add more compute. Memory disaggregation is enabled by Celestial’s technology.”
