Ayar Labs valuation 2026: above $5B, up from $3.75B six months earlier. A $225 million secondary priced the Nvidia-, AMD- and Intel-backed optical interconnect maker above $5 billion in September 2026. Here is every disclosed round, who led it, and what the price assumes. Editor-in-chief: Trace Cohen - Angel investor, VC, family office, operator and founder · 3x founder (BrandYourself, Launch.it, SPOT) · 65+ investments 65+Investments 3xFounder $200M+Funds Tracked Quick Answer Ayar Labs' valuation passed $5 billion in September 2026, when a $225 million secondary share sale led by Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners priced the company, Reuters reported. That is up from the $3.75 billion valuation of its $500 million Series E in March 2026. Ayar Labs is worth more than $5 billion as of September 2026, a price set by a $225 million secondary sale, up from $3.75 billion six months earlier and just above $1 billion in December 2024. Ayar Labs, the San Jose, California-based maker of optical chips that connect AI accelerators, extended its Series E by $150 million on September 10, 2026, and at the same time Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners led a $225 million purchase of shares from early employees and investors that valued the company at more than $5 billion, Reuters reported. Value Add VC covered the raise in its Pulse story on Ayar Labs' $650 million year; this page tracks the valuation over time. secondary sale price Ayar Labs valuation, Sep 2026 $500M primary Series E valuation, Mar 2026 $500M + $150M Primary capital raised, 2026 Total outside funding, Sep 2026 Sources: Reuters via SRN News (September 10, 2026), SiliconANGLE (September 10, 2026), Ayar Labs Series E announcement via Pulse 2.0 (March 3, 2026). Ayar Labs valuation: the $5 billion secondary. Ayar Labs' current valuation, more than $5 billion, comes from a secondary transaction rather than a priced primary round. Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners led a $225 million secondary share purchase from early employees and investors that valued Ayar at more than $5 billion, with Sequoia Global Equities, ARK Invest and Greycroft taking part, Reuters reported on September 10, 2026. The money went to the sellers, not to Ayar. The step-up from the March Series E is at least 33% (Value Add VC's arithmetic: $5 billion against $3.75 billion; the reported figure is "more than" $5 billion, so the true markup is higher by an undisclosed amount). Secondary prices can differ from what a primary round would pay, because the shares changing hands may carry different rights than new preferred stock; Reuters did not say which class was sold. The $5 billion figure is a market price for existing shares, not a new round on the company's books. How has Ayar Labs' valuation changed? Ayar Labs was founded in 2015 and did not raise significant outside capital until 2020, when it took in $35 million, SiliconANGLE noted. Ayar Labs raised $155 million in December 2024 at a valuation above $1 billion, led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Nvidia participating, which brought its total funding to $370 million, Pulse 2.0 reported. Ayar Labs raised a $500 million Series E at a $3.75 billion valuation on March 3, 2026, led by Neuberger Berman, taking its total funding to $870 million, according to the company's announcement. New investors in that round included Alchip Technologies, ARK Invest, Insight Partners, MediaTek, Qatar Investment Authority, Sequoia Global Equities and 1789 Capital. Six months later came the $150 million extension and the secondary. Ayar Labs funding history. | Date | Round | Amount | Valuation | Lead / named investors | | 2015 | Founded | n/a | n/a | CEO and co-founder Mark Wade | | 2020 | First significant raise | $35M | Not disclosed | Not listed in source | | Dec 12, 2024 | Growth round | $155M | Above $1B | Advent Global Opportunities, Light Street Capital | | Mar 3, 2026 | Series E | $500M | $3.75B | Neuberger Berman | | Sep 10, 2026 | Series E extension | $150M | Not disclosed | Wiwynn joined backers | | Sep 10, 2026 | Secondary sale | $225M (to sellers) | More than $5B | Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners | | Sep 2026 | Cumulative | Just over $1B raised | n/a | n/a | How Value Add VC counted: primary rounds and the one disclosed secondary; amounts and valuations as each source states them; 2015 to September 10, 2026; as of October 15, 2026. Sources: SiliconANGLE, Pulse 2.0, Reuters via SRN News. Why are investors paying more for Ayar Labs? Ayar Labs makes co-packaged optics: its TeraPHY optical engines, powered by the SuperNova remote light source, move data between AI chips over fiber instead of copper, Unite.AI reported. "Copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor for AI scale-up," CEO Mark Wade said in the company's September 10 announcement. As clusters stretch past a single server rack, the links between chips cost power and heat, and optics is the industry's main answer. The cap table explains much of the price. Nvidia, AMD and MediaTek, three companies that would put Ayar's chips next to their own, all invested, along with Intel, chip designer Alchip and Taiwanese server maker Wiwynn. A buyer of Ayar stock is buying a company whose likely customers have already paid to be on its side. When will Ayar Labs make money at scale? Not before 2028, on the company's own timeline. "If my customers' products are looking to ramp in the 2028-2029 time frame, we have to have all of our stuff qualified for volume production by the end of the 2027 time frame," Wade told Reuters. SiliconANGLE reported that Ayar hopes to bring the technology to the mass market by early 2028. The 2026 money is going to that transition: product development, validation, scaling the manufacturing supply chain and a new design center in Bengaluru, India, which adds to engineering teams in the US and Hsinchu, Taiwan. Ayar has not disclosed revenue. What the headline misses. The $5 billion price rests on revenue that, by the CEO's own schedule, arrives in 2028 at the earliest. Between now and then Ayar has to get its parts qualified at foundries and packaging partners in volume, which is where many chip startups stall. A two-year delay in customers' system ramps would push the payoff out with it. Strategic investors cut both ways, too. Nvidia, AMD and Intel investing in Ayar does not commit any of them to buy its parts, and each has the engineering budget to build or source optics another way. Optical interconnect is a crowded field; its Eliyan valuation analysis covers one of the other chip-connection startups raising on the same thesis. The bottom line. Ayar Labs' valuation is above $5 billion as of September 2026, set by a $225 million secondary, after a $3.75 billion Series E in March and a valuation just above $1 billion in December 2024. The company has raised just over $1 billion in total, $650 million of it in 2026, and is aiming for volume production by the end of 2027. The next mark to watch is a priced primary round or an IPO filing; neither has been announced. Track this and other AI infrastructure rounds on its AI valuations tracker. Latest from the Pulse. Get VC data most people never see - free to subscribe Trace's notes on venture, AI and startups, a few times a week. Join 5,000+ subscribers. 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Ayar Labs positions optical chiplets for AI data center bottleneck. Ayar Labs CEO Mark Wade says AI data centers are nearing a physical limit as electrical links struggle to connect GPUs and accelerators over longer distances at higher bandwidth. His core bet, developed over roughly 15 years, is that optical connectivity must move inside the compute package and be manufactured through leading-edge CMOS supply chains rather than treated as a telecom niche. The company is building optical engines that combine a 3nm electrical IC made in TSMC COUPE with a photonics wafer process, advanced packaging and optical connectors. Wade frames the hardest remaining challenges as laser manufacturing and production test architecture, including how to bring photonics into wafer-scale testing, assembly and manufacturing economics. Ayar has built a strategic investor base around the ecosystem, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, TSMC and Wiwynn. It previously shipped a 2 Tbps chiplet, then a 4 Tbps chiplet, and later an 8 Tbps part to customer R&D labs, helping support institutional financing. The Series E earlier in 2026 was led by Newberger Berman, and Wiwynn's investment brought $650 million year-to-date on the primary side. Wade expects leading-edge GPU makers to deploy co-packaged optics in 2028-2029, followed by broader accelerator adoption in 2029-2031. Ayar is positioning for an IPO aligned with that deployment window, arguing that optical engines could become a capacity-constrained component similar to HBM in the next AI infrastructure cycle. Originally reported by finance.biggo.com Read the source

Ayar Labs bags $150M in additional late-stage funding to help make bigger AI chip clusters. Networking technology startup Ayar Labs Inc. said today it has extended its recent late-stage funding round to $650 million after raising an additional $150 million from an unnamed investor. The company originally disclosed it had raised $500 million in its Series E round back in March, which was led by Neuberger Berman. Nvidia Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and MediaTek Inc. also participated in that round, which brought its total amount raised to $870 million. With today's Series E extension, Ayar Labs has now raised just over a billion dollars in outside funding. The enormous amount of money being funneled its way underscores the massive potential of its optical interconnect technology, which enables artificial intelligence chips to be linked to fiber optical cables and speed up data transmission in AI clusters. Ayar Labs says its big ambition is to help AI systems scale even bigger than they already are by replacing the copper interconnects that are currently widespread in AI data centers. By doing that, it believes it can accommodate the growth of even bigger chip clusters and larger foundation models. Copper interconnects have become a major bottleneck in AI data centers, because they suffer from three major problems - distance limitations, power and temperature. Copper cables only work well over short distances, because the data signals start to degrade the further the cable extends. In addition, copper cables are power-hungry, and when AI clusters grow to thousands of graphics processing units, which must all be linked with copper wires, the cost of the energy requirements becomes unsustainable, the startup says. The third problem is that copper wires often overheat when connected to multiple high-performance processors, causing workloads to break down. Ayar Labs' solution is a product called TeraPHY, which swaps out the copper for optical interconnects that have greater bandwidth, performance, power efficiency and lower latency, meaning they can potentially link much larger clusters of GPUs across data centers. The company has also developed co-packaged optics technology to place its TeraPHY Optical Engine directly into the ASIC socket of servers, alongside the GPU, further enhancing connectivity. "Copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor for AI scale-up," said co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Wade. "This funding allows us to move faster on manufacturing-ready co-packaged optics at scale. We're deepening our work across the foundry and packaging ecosystem and growing our engineering capacity to support customer programs worldwide." Ayar Labs has been doing this for a while, but it's only in recent years that the startup has started getting real momentum. Founded way back in 2015, it didn't raise any significant capital until five years later, when it finally received $35 million in funding from outside investors. But with the AI boom, development of optical interconnects has suddenly taken on a real sense of urgency, which is why some of its biggest backers are the chipmakers that stand to benefit from bigger clusters of chips. Wade told Reuters the company now hopes to bring its technology to the mass market by early 2028. The money from the Series E round has already helped to pay for a new chip design center in Bengaluru, India, and the extra cash from today's extension will help it to start preparing its products. But it needs to work fast. "We build the optical chip, and our optical chip gets fed into the customer's product," he explained. "If my customer's products are looking to ramp in the 2028-2029 time frame, we have to have all of our stuff qualified for volume production by the end of 2027." The startup can at least expect some help from its new partner Wiwynn Corp., a Taiwanese data center infrastructure company that has also invested in it. Ayar Labs said Wiwynn made a strategic investment earlier this year, but it's not clear if that's where the Series E extension money comes from. It has been working with Wiwynn to deliver optically connected, rack-scale AI systems that can support hyperscale workloads. The systems leverage SuperNova remote light source technology to integrate directly into Wiwynn's rack-level server architecture. "Co-packaged optics is a foundational technology for the next generation of AI and cloud data centers," said Wiwynn CEO William Lin. "Through our collaboration and investment with Ayar Labs, we see a clear path to new architectures that reduce the power and complexity limits of copper interconnects, powering rack-scale deployment for the next wave of hyperscale AI data centers." Photo: Ayar Labs. 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