CScale exited stealth today and announced $145 million in funding to accelerate development and commercialization of optical interconnect for gigawatt-scale AI.
CScale is focused on AI scale-up and the high-bandwidth, ultra-low-latency connections that let accelerators work together like a single, much larger computer.
The Series C funding round brings the company’s total funding to $188 million. The round was co-led by Atreides Management and Premji Invest, with backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, and Maverick Capital. Nvidia and Intel Capital joined as CScale’s first strategic investors.
In the gigawatt-class AI data centers expected by the end of the decade, a single scale-up domain will span thousands of tightly coupled accelerators across dozens of racks. (Check out this story on Meta’s gigawatt-scale data center in Ohio).
These systems demand high bandwidth, predictable low latency, and continuous communication. Across hundreds of thousands of accelerators, failures that are rare on any individual link become a continuous fleet-level condition, degrading portions of the AI factory unless they can be contained. CScale is architecting its interconnect to contain optical failures without interrupting compute.
“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.”
“CScale’s strength is its architectural judgment: understanding which technical choices create value for the entire system,” said Sandesh Patnam, managing partner at Premji Invest, in a statement. “The team combines deep expertise across photonics, electronics and software with the deployment experience to turn optical capability into dependable AI infrastructure. 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.”
Lund previously built Broadcom’s switching business into a billion-dollar franchise and held senior executive roles at Microsoft and Cadence. Most recently, he led Cisco’s Common Hardware Group, responsible for silicon, hardware systems, and optics, including Silicon One.
“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 trade-offs.”
CScale was founded in 2023 by CTO Sanjai Kohli, who co-founded SiRF, helping bring GPS to the mass market and earning the 2010 European Inventor Award, and later founded Inovi, acquired by Facebook in 2014. CScale is based in Palo Alto, California, and it has 85 people.