Listen to this articlenEye.ai raised $80 million in Series C funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures. The round lifts total capital to $152 million and will speed up production of its silicon photonics-based optical circuit switches for AI data centers.
nEye.ai has closed an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with continued participation from Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Socratic Partners, and other existing backers. This brings the company’s total capital raised to $152 million and marks a significant step in scaling its optical interconnect technology for AI driven data centers.
How will nEye.ai use the funds?
The proceeds will primarily fund the acceleration of development and high volume manufacturing for nEye.ai’s proprietary Optical Circuit Switches (OCS). These devices address the escalating demands of AI infrastructure, where gigawatt scale “AI factories” have become the norm and composable architectures are increasingly essential. nEye.ai’s “OCS on a chip” architecture enables dynamic, flexible pooling of CPUs, GPUs, and memory resources across data centers, supporting rapid reconfiguration as AI models and workloads evolve.
What is nEye.ai’s technology?
At the core of the technology is the integration of silicon photonics, advanced MEMS, and CMOS processes onto a single chip. This design delivers ultra low latency, massive bandwidth, and dramatically improved power efficiency compared with traditional electrical or mechanically assembled optical switches. By shifting to a foundry compatible, wafer scale manufacturing process, nEye.ai eliminates the cost and complexity barriers that have historically limited optical circuit switching adoption. The result is a compact, high performance solution suited for scale up, scale out, and scale across deployments in hyperscale environments.
Sutter Hill Ventures’ leadership of the round underscores the strategic importance of optical networking in the next phase of AI infrastructure. Stefan Dyckerhoff, Managing Director at Sutter Hill, has joined nEye.ai’s board of directors. The market for optical circuit switching is projected to exceed $3 billion within the next three years, driven by the need for energy efficient, high density interconnects that can keep pace with exploding AI compute requirements. CapitalG General Partner James Luo highlighted that optical switching has become a requirement for unlocking AI training and inference at scale, citing nEye.ai’s approach as uniquely positioned to meet the extreme density and power constraints of modern hyperscale data centers.
The funding arrives at a pivotal moment for the company. CEO Ashish Vengsarkar noted that while the round validates the underlying technology, the immediate priority is ramping foundry based production and satisfying the rigorous qualification standards of hyperscaler customers. The addition of Sutter Hill’s expertise alongside strategic partners like CapitalG, M12, and Micron Technology strengthens nEye.ai’s ability to address the full spectrum of enterprise and cloud provider use cases.
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nEye.ai’s leadership team combines deep domain expertise in silicon photonics, optical networking, and large scale data center operations. Co-founders include Chief Scientist Ming Wu, a UC Berkeley professor and serial entrepreneur with prior exits in optical and biotech hardware, and CTO Tae Joon Seok, an expert in integrated photonics. CEO Ashish Vengsarkar brings extensive experience from Google’s optical networking efforts and multiple startup exits. The broader executive team, including VP Engineering Jefferson Wagener (ex Bell Labs, Nistica) and others with Google, AWS, and Broadcom backgrounds, positions the company to execute on both technical innovation and commercial deployment.
This Series C round reflects growing investor conviction that reconfigurable optical fabrics will be foundational to sustainable, high performance AI infrastructure. By solving critical bottlenecks in power consumption, latency, and resource utilization, nEye.ai is enabling data centers to move beyond rigid, power hungry electrical interconnects toward photon driven architectures that scale with the relentless growth of AI workloads. The capital infusion equips the company to transition from technology validation to volume production, positioning it to capture share in a rapidly expanding market segment critical to the future of artificial intelligence.
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