Staera raises $4.6M to build optical links inside AI chips
What's the deal? Staera Semiconductor, formerly New Silicon Corporation, emerged from stealth with US$4.6 million in pre-seed funding to build optical data links directly into silicon chips. Openspace Capital led the round, with participation from SGInnovateDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Black Kite CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, 28 Holdings, In GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Decimus Technologies.
What's the endgame? Staera targets the bottleneck that now limits how large AI systems can grow: moving data between chips. Its first product, Lightwire, replaces copper links with light generated inside the chip itself, built on the same wafer as the chip's circuits.
Why now? AI chips compute faster than copper wiring can feed them, and copper's electrical performance falls a thousandfold between one millimetre and one metre — the distances that connect chips, boards, and racks. The International Energy Agency expects data centre electricity use to more than double, from about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030.
How it works: Most optical links today are separate parts attached next to the chip. Staera fabricates the entire link inside commercial silicon wafers, designed to run in existing fabs without adding size, heat, or power. The company says it has built GaN LEDs into silicon chips in commercial foundries since 2016, at 98 to 99 percent yield.
The claim: Staera says Lightwire moves data using less than a tenth of the energy of today's best optical links. Shifting 24 terabytes per second would take under 50 watts, it claims, against nearly a kilowatt for co-packaged optics.
What the founder says: "AI's bottleneck is no longer how fast chips compute, but how fast and far they can move data," said chief executive officer Andrew Kim. "This funding takes Lightwire from the lab to customers."
What could go wrong? The energy figures are company claims, not yet demonstrated at scale, and commercial release is not planned until 2030. Staera also enters a crowded field: Broadcom says it has begun shipping co-packaged-optics systems to cloud customers, while a 2026 industry group — including AMD, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia — is working to standardise optical links.
The signal: The round is a modest early bet on a potentially important architecture rather than a near-term fix for AI's data bottleneck. But the problem Staera is chasing — power-hungry interconnects — is drawing serious money from the industry's biggest names, and the pre-seed ranks above roughly 93% of comparable Singapore deals in its category.
Read more: morningstar.com
Image credit: cbowns
