Lumilens raises $700M Series C to swap data-center wires for light

Lumilens has raised more than $700 million in Series C funding, valuing the company at $5.51 billion and taking its total capital raised above $900 million. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech Capital, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital.

AI data centers are running into a connectivity bottleneck: as more processors are packed into each cluster, the optical links between them become as important as the GPUs themselves. Lumilens says its first scale-out product is already shipping into production AI data centers under a multi-billion-dollar customer agreement, only about two years after the company was founded.

Lumilens is building across both sides of the data-center network. Its portfolio includes near-package and co-packaged optics for scale-up connections inside AI systems, as well as 800G, 1.6T and future pluggable transceivers for scale-out links between racks. The company says its LumiCore platform combines silicon photonics, mixed-signal ICs, electrical-optical interposers and optical systems, while the new funding will support expansion across engineering, software and high-volume manufacturing.

The round highlights how investors are shifting attention from AI compute alone to the infrastructure needed to connect thousands of processors into a single, efficient system — and to manufacture that connectivity at hyperscaler scale.