Quintessent – a silicon photonics and quantum dot laser company – announced it has closed on just over $11.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round. Osage University Partners (OUP) led the fund round with new investors such as M Ventures and joined existing investors Sierra Ventures, Foothill Ventures, and Entrada Ventures.
The popularity of AI has been driving a rapid transition and growth of computing infrastructure, such as general-purpose architectures, to ones designed for accelerated computing. This new shift requires the orchestration of massively parallel units of distributed yet interconnected compute resources at the cluster or data center scale. So the interconnecting fabric’s data movement efficiency is a major bottleneck to accelerating system performance at scale.
Attaining sustainable growth in computing and data movement requires new technology and architecture that could match the rapid progression of bandwidth (density) scaling from computing and switching interfaces while minimizing power, latency, fiber count, chip size, and total cost of ownership. Improvements in reliability relative to today’s technologies are also required to enable practical deployment at scale and ensure better service quality.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
- Alan Liu, CEO and co-founder of Quintessent
“Novel chip-scale laser architectures have rarely been the focus of today’s photonics companies because the industry is still so nascent and focused in on engineered solutions. But at OUP, as we observed various A.I. and computing hardware companies push the limits of bandwidth and packaging with optical systems, we found they were all challenged by the scaling and cost of their optical laser source. 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
