The explosive growth in high-performance computing across AI, cloud and data-heavy workloads has fueled a massive demand for chips, servers, and data-center infrastructure. An often-overlooked side-effect of this is the need to connect all those chips and servers and run distributed AI loads across them. That requires huge bandwidth connectivity while keeping power budgets under control, a universal challenge across modern datacenters.. Today, this is still not solved at scale.
We are excited to announce our investment into LightSpeed Photonics, a company developing transformative optical interconnects to move data as light - fast and at low-power consumption in a compact form factor.
Traditional interconnects (on the top above) eat space on the cards and have significant power requirements of 0.15–0.30 J per GB at 400–800G speeds. This is pushing the industry toward co-packaged optics (CPO) and near-packaged optics (NPO). CPO holds a lot of promise but demands a full chip/package re-architecture which increases barriers to adoption; LightSpeed is building NPO: solderable optical interconnects that are retro-fittable into today’s boards.
LightKonnect is a solderable module that replaces copper or traditional optics with efficient laser light, delivering ~2× lower power than traditional interconnects and a ~20× smaller footprint. That frees valuable board real estate for what really matters: more compute
For longer distances and clean rack wiring, LightKonnect Fiber mates LightKonnect with standard MTP/MPO fiber. And because the platform is both PCIe Gen-6 and optical ethernet compatible and solderable, it fits GPU servers, DPUs/SmartNICs, and disaggregated storage across a rack, without forcing a packaging overhaul.
Building what LightSpeed is building is incredibly complex. Everything has to line up within microns and stay that way on a hot, vibrating board. The laser, lens, and the detector need to be perfectly aligned even as materials expand differently, the PCB warps, or the server gets bumped. Heat has to be pulled out of lasers and drivers without letting temperature drift knock the optics out of focus. The package needs clean, low-outgassing materials so a tiny speck doesn’t kill coupling. Stray reflections and electrical noise need to be tamed so that electronics don’t interfere with the light path. It has to be buildable at scale - including fixtures, active alignment, epoxies, fiber attach - with good yield. And all of this has to be at a cost that the datacenter will pay.
Rohin Y and Ramana V Pamidighantam bring a very relevant background to build Lightspeed Photonics. Ramana V Pamidighantam brings decades of experience in semiconductor packaging and Rohin has been involved in the photonics industry for many years. Both of them bring bold vision, top engineering skills and international network to make LightSpeed a global leader.
With the latest funds, LightSpeed aims to strengthen joint development activities with both OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and ODM (Original Design Manufacturers) partners, commercialize LightKonnect Fiber, and complete certifications for large-scale deployment. They also plan to continue to invest in R&D to be able to scale the technology for future requirements in AI and data center use cases.
At pi Ventures, we’re excited to back LightSpeed Photonics as they tackle one of modern computing’s most stubborn bottlenecks: moving data fast, at low power, without ripping up the whole system. This fits our mission to fund deep-tech that solves real-world problems at scale. LightSpeed’s near-packaged solution - solderable, compact, and compatible with today’s boards - offers a credible path to deployable bandwidth-per-watt gains across AI and HPC. We’re proud to partner with the team as they scale manufacturing, expand ecosystem integrations (PCIe, GPUs/DPUs, storage), and prove the tech in production environments. If we get interconnect right, we make large-scale computing cheaper, and greener, and LightSpeed is on a mission to get it right.