The Pulse
PicoJool Raises $27.5M to Expand AI Data Center Optical Links
PicoJool announced a $27.5 million Series A led by Socratic Partners, with Hudson River Trading participating. The Palo Alto company plans to expand in the United States and Taiwan as it prepares VCSEL and microVCSEL products for customer q
AI.info Team ·
“Reaching 200G per lane proved that the performance is there. Our focus now is execution,” said Al Yuen, founder and CEO of PicoJool.
PicoJool announced a $27.5 million Series A on September 24, led by Socratic Partners with participation from Hudson River Trading. The Palo Alto company says it will use the capital to expand its teams and facilities in the United States and Taiwan while bringing optical links for AI data centers toward customer qualification and production.
A $39.5 million total for optical connectivity
The new round follows a $12 million seed investment led by Playground Global, bringing PicoJool’s disclosed funding to $39.5 million. The company plans to add staff across research and development, operations, sales and marketing, and build capacity to qualify, manufacture and support products for hyperscalers and data center operators.
PicoJool is developing vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, or VCSELs, and related optical-link products. The company’s product range includes 100G and 200G VCSELs, plus microVCSEL configurations at 50G NRZ and 64G NRZ/PAM4. Those figures describe product configurations; PicoJool separately says its broader connectivity portfolio is designed to scale from 800G to 1.6T, 3.2T and beyond.
From 200G lanes to customer qualification
Yuen said the funding will support customer qualification and expansion from chip-level VCSELs and microVCSELs into AOC and NPO modules. The company says it has started early sampling of its chip-level VCSEL products ahead of broader availability. The announcement does not give a timetable for qualification, production or commercial shipments.
PicoJool says its 200G products exceed 37GHz of bandwidth. Its stated configurations include quad 100G, quad 200G and 32-by-50G NRZ microVCSEL designs, which it presents as different routes to 1.6T connectivity depending on bandwidth, power and system requirements.
Foundry work remains part of the plan
The company says it is working with WIN Semiconductor and other gallium arsenide foundries to prepare its 200G VCSELs for production. It is also working with system companies and hyperscalers on next-generation pluggable, near-packaged optics and co-packaged optics solutions.
PicoJool frames its microVCSEL design as a massively parallel architecture intended to raise aggregate bandwidth while reducing the energy used to move each bit. That is a stated product goal, not a demonstrated outcome at deployed data-center scale in the funding announcement. The immediate work Yuen describes is more specific: expand operations, qualify products with customers and prepare manufacturing capacity for the optical components and modules.
The gap between a chip milestone and a shipped link
The raise gives PicoJool funding for that transition, but the company’s own description places its products at different stages: early sampling has begun for chip-level VCSELs, while foundry work is preparing the 200G parts for production. Its plans also span the United States and Taiwan, with the company intending to expand teams and facilities in both locations.
For now, the clearest measure of progress in the announcement is not a customer deployment or production volume. It is the 200G-per-lane milestone, the start of early sampling, and PicoJool’s effort to move from individual optical chips into complete links and modules.