Teramount Raises $8-Million to Enable Silicon Photonics for Next-Generation Semiconductor Connectivity

The round led by Grove Ventures follows breakthrough results for the company’s photonic-plug technology, which enables high-speed optical connectivity for next-generation data centers, high-performance computing, 5G, sensor, and other datacom applications.

Teramount, a provider of optical connectivity solutions for ultra-high bandwidth applications, announced the completion of an $8-million funding round led by Grove Ventures with participation from Amelia Investments and former executive VP of Intel and company Chairman, David (Dadi) Perlmutter, along with other private investors. The round will support the continued development and commercialization of its technology.

The funding comes as the semiconductor industry faces critical problems to support the next generation needs of high-speed data transfer and the ever-growing demand for higher bandwidth. Silicon-photonics, which realizes speed of light data transfer at low power consumption, is attracting more attention and fast adoption by leading semiconductor vendors to address bandwidth issues. While the industry’s silicon side is highly standardized, photonics production remains customized via costly in-house processes that hamper scalability, drive up costs and reduce manufacturing reliability.

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Teramount’s recent breakthrough, which demonstrated 100X improved tolerance in assembling fiber to silicon chip compared to existing technologies, will enable successful integration of optics with silicon and scalable deployment of silicon photonics.  With this investment, Teramount will be able to capitalize on this photonics breakthrough and become the first to advance to the productization stage in order to make this leap in performance an industry reality.

Teramount’s successful productization is poised to solve one of the most significant challenges of next-generation data center co-packaged switches – the need to reliably connect hundreds of fibers to a single switch chip at high yield and low cost. That same technology will also enable breakthroughs in 5G, sensors, mobility, and chip-to-chip optical connectivity that will become an industry-standard in heavy computing workload required for cloud computing, AI-related machines, entertainment, and more.

“This investment is a major vote of confidence in our breakthrough photonic-plug technology, which will open the door to next-generation tech set to fulfill the promise of silicon photonics in data centers, mobility  5G and beyond,” said Hesham Taha, CEO of Teramount. “Our recent results in the development of co-packaged switches are a crucial first step and now with this funding, we’re readying to take the giant leap forward to productization and market impact.”

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“The insatiable need for dependable high bandwidth solutions requires solving the issue of a complex integration of optics directly on silicon switches in a co-packaged configuration and that issue has remained unsolved until now,” said Lior Handelsman, General Partner at Grove Ventures. “Teramount’s cost-effective, high-yield solutions for connecting hundreds of fibers to a single switch chip is a uniquely scalable solution that offers superior performance, dependability, and cost. It represents a unique opportunity to upend the status quo on an incredible scale and we’re excited to be a part of it.”

“The ever-increasing need for computing speed and capacity for the current and future needs driven by the world moving fast to digital and the growth of AI applications requires data transfers in the data center and between computers in light speed” said David (Dadi) Perlmutter, Teramount chairman “Teramount technology, not only makes it happen, but makes it manufacturable in higher yields and volume”

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