Lumilens, a US-based AI infrastructure startup, has emerged from stealth and announced a $700 million funding round backed by Peak XV, EDBI, and several other investors.
The financing, which values Lumilens at $5.51 billion, was co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures, and Spark Capital. It brings the startup’s total funding to over $900 million, per the announcement.
Other participants in the round included Addition, Alkeon, HarbourVest, JP Morgan Private Capital, Mayfield, MVP Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Seifdune.
EDBI, the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board, also participated in the Series C, alongside Lingotto and Thomvest Ventures, among others.
The funding announcement coincides with Lumilens emerging from stealth, two years after its founding to address connectivity bottlenecks in artificial intelligence data centres.
Lumilens was founded in early 2024 by CEO Ankur Singla, who previously founded infrastructure companies Contrail Systems and Volterra, which were acquired by Juniper Networks and F5, respectively.
He is joined by CTO and co-founder Ted Schmidt, a former engineer at Juniper Networks.
The startup develops near-package and co-packaged optics, as well as pluggable optical transceivers.
Its products are built on LumiCore, an in-house platform spanning silicon photonics, mixed-signal integrated circuits, electrical-optical interposers and optical systems.
It develops optical interconnect technology aimed at connecting thousands of graphics processing units, or GPUs, as a single AI system.
“The constraint on AI has shifted from how many GPUs you can buy to how many you can connect,” said Singla.
He added that hyperscalers require greater optical capacity for their existing networks and technology capable of directly connecting thousands of GPUs into a single cluster.
“We built Lumilens to deliver both and to manufacture at the volume, quality, and pace this buildout demands,” Singla added.
The company said it will use the fresh capital to expand its silicon, systems, software, process engineering, and high-volume manufacturing operations.
Lumilens’ latest funding comes amid sustained investor appetite for AI startups, as companies across Asia continue to raise sizeable rounds to build infrastructure, develop foundation models and expand enterprise applications.
Most recently, Singapore-headquartered AI infrastructure startup Acrab announced a $130-million Series B round backed by existing investors Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India and Vertex Growth, alongside new investors.
The deal adds to an accelerating wave of AI investment across the region. AI startups in Greater China, India and Southeast Asia raised at least $20.3 billion in disclosed funding in the first half of the year.
Greater China accounted for about 90% of the funding, underscoring both the scale of its capital market and the depth of its AI ecosystem.
