PicoJool has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding, led by Socratic Partners, with participation from Hudson River Trading. Here’s why we invested…
For most of modern computing, progress has come from making individual chips faster.
Smaller transistors, higher clock speeds, more cores, and increasingly powerful accelerators have driven decades of performance gains. But as artificial intelligence scales, the center of gravity is beginning to shift. The question is no longer just how much performance can be delivered by a single processor. Increasingly, it is how effectively thousands, or even tens of thousands, of processors can work together as one system.
The ability to move information efficiently throughout a computing system is becoming just as important as the ability to process it.
This shift has profound implications for infrastructure. Every generation of AI requires larger models, more data, and more computing resources. The resulting scale places enormous demands on the pathways that connect those resources together. As systems grow, communication becomes a larger contributor to power consumption, cost, and overall performance. In many cases, the challenge is no longer creating compute capacity. It is ensuring that compute can exchange information quickly enough to remain productive.
Historically, electrical interconnects via copper have been the foundation of that communication. They have served the industry remarkably well, enabling decades of scaling across servers, storage systems, and networking equipment. But the requirements of modern AI are pushing against the practical limits of what copper can withstand. The solutions that worked for previous computing eras are becoming more difficult to extend indefinitely. Optics have already replaced scale out connections; it is now time for scale-up connections within the rack make the same transition.
We invested in Picojool because they are focused on one of the critical enabling technologies required in this next phase of scale-up optical interconnect. Picojool is developing the first commercial 200G VCSEL platform purpose-built for this transition, delivering the performance, efficiency, and scalability required for next-generation optical interconnects while maintaining the manufacturability and economics necessary for large-scale deployment.
What attracted us to Picojool was the combination of a large and rapidly expanding market opportunity with a team uniquely positioned to advance a technology that has been the workhorse of short-reach data center optics for more than three decades. We often talk about founder-market fit, but the strongest examples are founders who helped create the very markets they are now building in. Picojool Founder and CEO Al Yuen is one of those rare cases.
Long before optical interconnects became central to AI infrastructure, Al helped pioneer Active Optical Cables (AOCs), helping establish a category that would become foundational to modern data centers. Today, as the scale-up industry undergoes the architectural shift toward optics, Al is once again focused on the next critical enabling technology, one in which he has nearly four decade of experience with.
Al has assembled a unique team of VCSEL experts with unparalleled experience building and scaling VCSEL-based products over the last few decades. The challenges in optical communications have never been limited to device innovation alone; success requires translating technical breakthroughs into reliable, manufacturable, and cost-effective solutions. We believe Picojool’s combination of technical depth, industry experience, and execution know how positions the company to help define the next generation of optical connectivity for AI infrastructure.
While incumbent InP based optical solutions are power intensive, over-built, and supply constrained for 3-to-30-meter links that scale up requires, the lower power uLED challengers are promising but remain years away from datacenter scale deployment. Picojool is ready now to fill the gap with a field-proven optical device, an unconstrained and lower-cost GaAs supply chain, and a product roadmap aligned with future architecture generations at 800G, 1.6T, NPO and beyond.
Picojool, as the first 200G VCSEL platform, represents the key to this next generation of optical interconnect.