Volantis raises $88M for a photonic memory layer built for AI inference

Volantis has raised $88M to build a photonic link between AI compute and memory, using gallium arsenide lasers to avoid constraints in indium phosphide. The Netherlands is building a EUR 153M indium phosphide pilot line at Eindhoven that opens in 2027, the same year Volantis plans to ship.

Volantis has raised $88M to put light between AI chips and their memory. Its design deliberately routes around indium phosphide. Europe has committed EUR 153M to a pilot line that makes exactly that.

The Series A came from Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic and Susa Ventures taking part, as TechFundingNews reported . The San Francisco company plans first customer deliveries in 2027.

The founders are Tapa Ghosh, a Thiel fellow and former Y Combinator founder, and Roy Meade, who ran Micron’s high-bandwidth memory programme and was a vice president at Ayar Labs.

Its A-1 system targets models above 20 trillion parameters at up to 10,000 tokens a second per user. Those are design goals rather than measurements from a running machine.

The material choice is the European story. Volantis uses gallium arsenide lasers to sidestep constraints in indium phosphide, of which China holds 70% of supply .

Indium phosphide wafer prices rose about 250% by June. IQE’s chief executive called access to them a key risk for the semiconductor industry.

Europe has bet the other way. The Netherlands is building a EUR 153M indium phosphide pilot line at Eindhoven, and PhotonDelta opened a Silicon Valley hub to connect the two ecosystems.

That line moves to 6-inch wafers and becomes operational in 2027, the same year Volantis plans to ship.

Europe is not only indium phosphide. A Swiss startup builds photonic chips on thin-film lithium niobate , and the Dutch also work in silicon nitride.

The wider programme is larger. PIXEurope holds EUR 380M across 20 members in eleven countries, coordinated from Barcelona, with around EUR 133M going to the Netherlands.

The two sides are not funding the same thing. Europe’s money is public and industrial, while a EUR 60M fund is the kind of capital its photonics startups draw on. Lightmatter has raised $400M, Ayar Labs $500M and Lumilens over $700M.

Not everyone is betting on light. Switzerland’s Kandou raised $225M in March to argue that copper signalling can outlast the optical transition, because copper is already in every data centre.

Europe is building the factory while America funds the architectures that will or will not use it. Volantis is betting that the material Europe is industrialising is one to design around.