Summary
Santa Clara-based nEye.ai raised $80 million in Series C led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with CapitalG, M12, and Socratic Partners, bringing total funding to $152 million.
The company will scale manufacturing of its optical circuit switches, which use silicon photonics and MEMS to reduce power and overcome data center networking limits for AI. CEO Ashish Vengsarkar said focus now is meeting performance demands and scaling production for future growth globally.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based nEye.ai, a developer of optical networking hardware, said it has raised $80 million in Series C financing. Investors in the round were led by Palo Alto’s Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from existing investors, including Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG; Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12; and Florida’s Socratic Partners, among others. So far, the company has raised $152 million.
The company said the funding will accelerate the development of high-volume manufacturing of nEye’s proprietary optical circuit switches (OCS), which significantly reduce power needs and enhance performance.
“While this milestone validates our technology, our focus now shifts to scaling our foundry-based manufacturing and meeting the rigorous performance standards our customers demand,” said nEye.AI CEO Ashish Vengsarkar, a former Google engineer.
Founded in 2020 by Ming C. Wu, who serves as chief scientist and chairman, nEye emerged from research at the University of California, Berkeley. The company’s OCS-on-a-chip architecture replaces power-hungry electronics with high-speed silicon photonics and MEMS, creating a flexible optical fabric that allows AI models to function.
AI clusters are scaling faster than the copper and electronics that are meant to connect them, as modern data centers hit “networking wall” where power and latency throttle performance in high-performance computing, Vengsarkar said.
The company said its OCS — a micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS)-based silicon photonics — introduce compact, fast-switching optical layers that enable flexible pooling of CPU, GPU and memory resources, ensuring data center architectures can evolve alongside rapidly advancing AI models. By integrating silicon photonics, MEMS, and CMOS into a single chip, nEye’s technology reduces power consumption when compared to traditional switching solutions.
The company also announced that Stefan Dyckerhoff, managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, will join the nEye board.
“By moving away from complex mechanical assemblies to a foundry-compatible wafer-scale process, nEye is positioned to deliver the most cost-effective, high-performance switching solution for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across applications,” said Dyckerhoff, who previously worked at Juniper Networks.
Key Facts
Company: nEye.ai
Announcement: Raised $80 million in Series C financing
Investors: Investors in the round were led by Palo Alto’s Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from existing investors, including Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG; Microsoft’s Venture Fund, M12; and Florida’s Socratic Partners
Industry: Semiconductor Manufacturing
Industry Context: Reimagining data center connectivity through its unique Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) on-a-chip architecture.
Founders: Ming Wu
Company URL: nEye.ai