The Palo Alto-based start-up, backed for the first time by Nvidia and Intel, aims to prevent a faulty laser diode from bringing thousands of accelerators to a standstill.
Founded in 2023 and kept a low profile until now, CScale announced on September 30 a $145 million Series C round, jointly led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Premji Invest. Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon are putting in the pot, while Nvidia and Intel Capital are entering the capital as early strategic investors. The company has raised $188 million in total and employs about 85 people.
The problem of laser failures
CScale is tackling the so-called "scale-up" interconnection, which connects the accelerators of a cluster together so that they behave like a single giant machine, with very high throughput and minimal latency. In data centers that are now counted in gigawatts, the failure of an optical component ceases to be a rare incident and becomes a permanent phenomenon on the scale of the fleet. The start-up is developing an integrated light engine designed to isolate these failures without interrupting the calculation.
The company is led by Martin Lund, who has worked for Broadcom, Microsoft, Cadence and Cisco, where he oversaw silicon and optics. Its co-founder and CTO, Sanjai Kohli, co-founded SiRF, a pioneer of the GPS chip, and sold a previous start-up to Facebook in 2014.
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