Volantis

Market position

Volantis presents itself as the first company to scale photonics inside computer chips and to solve in-computer photonics for chip communication, contrasting its directly modulated laser and wafer-scale approach with the silicon photonics methods that have dominated optical interconnect research. Its team includes engineers drawn from optical and hardware companies including Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, Marvell, Rockley, Infinera, Lumentum, Juniper and Skorpios.

Rather than silicon photonics, Volantis uses directly modulated VCSELs coupled into dense parallel waveguides with wafer-scale integration, an approach it says removes the need for fiber and extends optical reach far beyond electrical interconnect limits, allowing far larger fast-memory pools per accelerator.

Technology

Volantis integrates low-cost, low-power directly modulated lasers (VCSELs) with densely parallel on-chip optical waveguides on large substrates, using wafer-scale integration rather than silicon photonics. The approach relies on parallelism — many slow, low-power optical links operating simultaneously — to achieve high aggregate bandwidth, an argument the company compares to the parallelism advantage of GPUs. The company states it has eliminated the need for fiber, with 10x the wire density of market-leading chips, and that optical reach extends beyond 200mm versus a roughly 2–5mm limit for electrical interconnect. Claimed system-level results include 15x better performance per dollar, over 30x lower latency for trillion-parameter-plus models at scale, and 6x better tokens per watt; a simulated benchmark cites 1,590 tokens/sec/user on DeepSeek-V3.2 for a single Volantis A-1 chip versus about 50 on an NVIDIA B200.

Go-to-market

Operators of large-scale AI inference infrastructure serving very large models, including workloads above 10 trillion parameters that require high tokens-per-second per user and improved cost and energy per token.

Geography

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, United States.

History

The company was founded in 2022 and operated in stealth while building prototypes. Over roughly two years it produced working, patent-pending prototype systems validating in-computer photonics. In June 2025 it emerged from stealth alongside a $9 million seed round, saying it would use the proceeds to refine its chip architecture, grow its engineering team and begin early customer engagements. Its website indicates pre-orders for photonic motherboards were slated to open in the first quarter of 2026.