Celestial AI

Celestial AI was founded in 2020 by semiconductor industry veterans Dave Lazovsky, founder and CEO of Intermolecular, Inc. (NASDAQ: IMI) and Preet Virk (Macom, Mindspeed Technologies) who realized early on that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning workloads would quickly become a data movement problem rather than a compute-limited problem for data centers. To solve this issue, Celestial’s CTO Phil Winterbottom (ex-Bell Labs, co-founded Entrisphere, Gainspeed) developed “Photonic Fabric”, an advanced optical interconnect technology designed to meet the growing demand for larger bandwidths in data centers. Unlike other photonic solutions, it delivers data directly to the point of compute on the silicon, offering >1.5 Tbit/s/mm2 package bandwidth (25X greater than CPO) and 10X lower latency. With high reach, protocol adaptability, and compatibility with standard interfaces, it outperforms electrical interconnects, enabling the connection and disaggregation of more servers while supporting latency-sensitive applications with remote memory usage. Additionally, its integration with high thermal design power ASICs sets it apart from traditional CPO technology.

The company’s investors include Koch Disruptive Technologies, Xora Innovation, the early stage investment vehicle of Temasek, IAG Capital Partners, The Engine, Samsung Catalyst, Porsche SE, IMEC.xpand and others.