Palo Alto-based CScale, an AI infrastructure company developing optical interconnect technology, has emerged from stealth with $145 million in Series C funding.
The round brings CScale’s total funding to $188 million and will support the development and commercialization of its optical interconnect technology for large-scale AI computing systems.
The round was led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Premji Invest, with Premji Invest joining as co-lead. Existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon also participated.
NVIDIA and Intel Capital joined the company as its first strategic investors.
CScale is developing optical interconnect technology designed to connect AI accelerators with high bandwidth and low latency.
These connections allow multiple accelerators to communicate and operate together as a larger computing system.
As AI models become more computationally demanding, data centers are deploying increasing numbers of accelerators across large clusters. CScale is developing infrastructure intended to support communication between these accelerators at scale.
CScale says future AI data centers could operate at gigawatt-class scale, with individual computing domains connecting thousands of tightly coupled accelerators across dozens of racks.
Such systems require high bandwidth, predictable low latency and continuous communication between computing components.
At very large scale, even failures that are uncommon on individual connections can become more frequent across an entire fleet of hundreds of thousands of accelerators.
“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.”
CScale is designing its interconnect architecture to help contain optical failures without interrupting AI computing workloads.
The company’s technology is centered on an integrated light engine designed to provide optical connectivity for AI infrastructure operating at large scale.
CScale was founded in 2023 and is led by CEO Martin Lund.
Lund previously built Broadcom’s switching business into a billion-dollar business and held senior executive positions at Microsoft and Cadence. He most recently led Cisco’s Common Hardware Group, which was responsible for silicon, hardware systems and optics, including Silicon One.
CScale’s founder and CTO Sanjai Kohli has founded and exited several communications technology companies.
Kohli previously founded SiRF, a company that helped bring GPS technology to the mass market. He received the 2010 European Inventor Award and later founded Inovi, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014.
CScale is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has approximately 85 employees globally.
The company plans to use its latest funding to accelerate product development and commercialization as AI infrastructure expands toward increasingly large computing clusters.
