Celestial AI, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, raised $56 million in Series A funding for its proprietary hardware and software platform for machine learning chipsets.
Celestial AI’s proprietary Photonic Fabric technology platform aims to to fundamentally transform multi-chip processing systems. The Photonic Fabric enables optically addressable memory and compute (within chip and chip-to-chip). The company says uts proprietary architecture enables elegant, low-complexity system software, allowing highly efficient mapping of data and compute without the need for complex optimizations. This software advantage extends to multi-chip exascale systems as the Photonic Fabric democratizes optical access to effectively limitless memory and compute.
The funding round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) with participation from Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund, The Engine, the venture firm spun out of MIT, Tyche Partners, Merck’s corporate venture fund, M-Ventures, IMEC XPand, and venture capital investor in the Princeton University ecosystem, Fitz Gate.
The new capital will be used for expanding the global engineering team, product development and strategic supplier engagements, including Broadcom, to build the company’s Orion AI accelerator products.
“We are addressing the problem of our time in computing – efficient data movement,” said Celestial AI founder and CEO David Lazovsky. “Celestial AI’s hybrid photonic-electronic platform allows us to leverage the complementary strengths of electronics for high-performance, high-precision computing and photonics for high-speed, low-power, high-bandwidth data movement. The result is transformational performance advantages relative to electronic-only systems. The ML application benefits extend beyond performance and low power to latency, user friendly software, and low total cost of ownership. Our competitive differentiation will increase with time, as AI model complexity increases, driving increased data movement.”
“Photonics is poised to be the technology to usher in the next era of rapid growth in AI and high-performance computing, and we believe the Celestial AI team has the experience and vision to drive this industry transformation,” said Isaac Sigron, Managing Director of KDT, and newly-appointed Celestial AI Board Member. “It was Celestial AI’s software advantages that ultimately drove our decision to lead this financing. Their system architecture enables unparalleled software simplicity, which translates to ease of use for customers and reduced time to market. Software is the pathway to revenue, and Celestial AI’s solution changes the game in this large and rapidly expanding market.”
