Volantis raises $88M Series A to attack the AI memory bottleneck with light

AI models keep getting larger, and the chips running them keep waiting on memory. Volantis just raised $88 million to try fixing that problem with lasers. The San Francisco semiconductor startup closed a Series A on October 1, 2026, bringing its total funding to $97 million. Its pitch: replace part of the electrical plumbing between AI chips and memory with optical connections. The round and the roster Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures co-led the round. John Doerr and VXI Capital also participated. That follows a $9 million seed round in 2025, backed by names including Alex Wang and Trevor Blackwell. The leadership team brings semiconductor and photonics experience from NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and Ayar Labs. CEO Tapa Ghosh leads the company. How Volantis wants to fix memory Compute chips have gotten dramatically faster, but feeding them data from memory has become a limiting factor for AI inference, the stage where a trained model actually answers your prompts. Volantis is attacking this with photonic interconnects. The core component is a custom micro-VCSEL, short for vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser. These are tiny lasers that shoot light straight up off a chip’s surface. Vo...