CScale has emerged from stealth with a $145 million Series C round to build optical interconnect technology for giant AI data centres, with Nvidia and Intel Capital joining as the startup’s first strategic investors.

The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Premji Invest, with participation from longtime backer Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon. The financing takes the Palo Alto company’s total funding to $188 million.

Founded in 2023 by CTO Sanjai Kohli, CScale is building an integrated optical light engine for AI “scale-up” systems — the high-bandwidth, low-latency links that let thousands of accelerators across dozens of racks work as a single computer. The company argues that in gigawatt-class data centres, rare failures on individual optical links become a constant fleet-level problem.

“As AI scale-up domains extend across dozens of racks, optical interconnect becomes essential,” said CEO Martin Lund. “We’re designing the interconnect for continuity. Lasers will fail. Compute shouldn’t.” The funding will accelerate development and commercialisation of the technology.