Volantis raises $88 million for optical AI-memory connections
Official brand graphic: VolantisVolantis announced an $88 million Series A on October 1, 2026, co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures. The round includes John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic and Susa Ventures, alongside angel investors Dwarkesh Patel, Naveen Rao and Sholto Douglas. The company separately reports $97 million raised to date; that cumulative total is not the size of this round. Volantis is developing photonic connections between compute chips and memory for AI inference. Its optical fabric pools memory and combines bandwidth as memory is added, using custom micro-VCSELs rather than external lasers. The financing will support development and commercialization of its A-1 inference system and photonic memory architecture, expansion of its engineering team and work towards customer deployments. The company plans to deliver its first integrated inference engines to customers in 2027. It says A-1 is being designed for models exceeding 20 trillion parameters at up to 10,000 tokens per second per user. Those figures are development targets, not verified performance from a shipping system.
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Additional reporting
Round details
$88M
Series A
Announced completed raise
Lachy Groom, Abstract Ventures
John Doerr (personal investor), VXI Capital, Triatomic, Susa Ventures
Dwarkesh Patel, Naveen Rao, Sholto Douglas
Develops photonic links between AI compute and memory for a planned inference system.
Develop and commercialise the A-1 photonic-memory architecture and expand engineering.
First integrated customer systems planned for 2027. Model size, bandwidth and token-speed figures are company design targets, not independently verified shipping benchmarks. Company says $97M raised to date; earlier backers named in its post are not all confirmed Series A participants.