Volantis has raised $88 million in a Series A round co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with participation from John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic Capital and Susa Ventures. Angel investors Dwarkesh Patel, Naveen Rao and Sholto Douglas also participated in the financing.
Founded in 2022 by Tapa Ghosh and Roy Meade, Volantis is a US semiconductor startup developing photonic infrastructure for AI inference. Ghosh serves as founder and CEO, while Meade is co-founder and CTO. The company is focused on addressing the memory bottleneck that can limit the capacity and speed of large AI models.
Volantis is developing A-1, an AI inference system that uses photonic interconnects to connect compute chips with memory. Its architecture uses light rather than conventional electrical connections to move data between compute and memory, with micro-VCSEL laser technology forming part of the optical system. The company says A-1 is being designed to support models exceeding 20 trillion parameters at speeds of up to 10,000 tokens per second per user. These figures represent Volantis’s stated design targets for the system.
The company plans to use the Series A capital to support the development and commercialization of A-1 and its photonic memory architecture, while expanding its engineering team. Volantis is working toward bringing its technology to customers as it develops the system for AI inference workloads.
