CScale has raised $145 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Premji Invest. Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon also participated, while NVIDIA and Intel Capital joined as the company’s first strategic investors. The financing brings CScale’s total funding to $188 million.
The Palo Alto, California-based company also emerged from stealth with the funding announcement. CScale said it will use the capital to accelerate the development and commercialization of its optical interconnect technology for AI scale-up systems.
Founded in 2023 by Sanjai Kohli, CScale is led by CEO Martin Lund, with Kohli serving as founder and CTO. The company develops integrated optical light engines intended to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency connections between AI accelerators across large computing systems.
CScale is designing its interconnect architecture around reliability in large AI computing environments. The company says its approach is intended to contain optical link failures so that individual failures do not interrupt active compute workloads across a scale-up domain.
The company is targeting the infrastructure requirements of increasingly large AI data centers, where scale-up networks can connect thousands of tightly coupled accelerators across multiple racks. CScale is headquartered in Palo Alto and has approximately 85 employees globally.
