Santa Barbara semiconductor firm raises $11.5M
Santa Barbara-based Quintessent, a semiconductor company that specializes in heterogeneous silicon photonics and quantum dot laser technology, announced it raised $11.5 million in an oversubscribed funding round, it said in a March 14 press release.
The round was led by Osage University Partners along with new investors including M Ventures. Santa Barbara-based Entrada Ventures also participated in the seed funding round reinvesting in the company.
“We are grateful for the support from our new and existing investors who all recognize the need for foundational innovations to catalyze sustainable and reliable interconnect scaling for the era of accelerated computing,” said Alan Liu, CEO and co-founder of Quintessent.
“This new funding allows us to grow our team and accelerate the development of highly scalable and highly reliable optical interconnects that transcend the scaling limitations of incumbent solutions, built on top of a unique technology stack including our multi-wavelength comb laser.”
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is leading to more specific designs around accelerated computing for the world’s computing infrastructure, according to the press release.
This type of computing requires the orchestration of massively parallel units of distributed but interconnected compute resources at the cluster or datacenter scale
As a result, achieving sustainable growth of computing and data movement will require new technologies and architectures that can match the rapid progression of bandwidth scaling from computing and switching interfaces while simultaneously minimizing power, latency, fiber count, chip size, and total cost of ownership. This is what Quintessent is aiming to solve.
“Quintessent’s plans to productize interconnect solutions powered by multi-wavelength quantum dot comb lasers may become one of the most critical product developments in photonics at just the right time to intercept the surging demand for optical connectivity at the largest computing corporations in the world,” Manny Stockman, a Partner at OUP who will be joining Quintessent’s Board of Directors, said in a press release.
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