Celestial AI secures $56 Million in Series A funding led by Koch Disruptive Technologies

Celestial AI, a California-based AI accelerator company with a software and hardware platform for machine learning chipsets, has now secured $56 million in a Series A funding round.

Celestial AI is founded by David Lazovsky. It is an AI accelerator company with a proprietary hardware and software technology platform that enables the next-gen of high-performance computing solutions.

The company's mission is to transform the way computing is done with their proprietary Photonic Fabric technology that uses light for data movement both within a chip and between chips.

Celestial AI founder and CEO David Lazovsky, said, "We are addressing the problem of our time in computing – efficient data movement. Celestial AI’s hybrid photonic-electronic platform allows us to leverage the complementary strengths of electronics for high-performance, high-precision computing and photonics for high-speed, low-power, high-bandwidth data movement. The result is transformational performance advantages relative to electronic-only systems. The ML application benefits extend beyond performance and low power to latency, user friendly software, and low total cost of ownership. Our competitive differentiation will increase with time, as AI model complexity increases, driving increased data movement."

Phil Inagaki, Managing Director at Xora Innovation, said, "Celestial AI has developed an architecture that uniquely scales across multi-chip systems, and greatly diminishes the development burden on AI teams bringing new applications to market. As the world moves to increasingly complex AI models, we believe that Celestial AI’s competitive advantage will only grow over time".

The round was backed by Koch Disruptive Technologies with participation from Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund, The Engine, the venture firm spun out of MIT, Tyche Partners, Merck’s corporate venture fund, M-Ventures, IMEC XPand, and venture capital investor in the Princeton University ecosystem, Fitz Gate. 

Post funding, Isaac Sigron, the Managing Director of KDT, will now join Celestial AI Board Member, notes the announcement.

The company, as of now, has plans to use the new funds for expanding the global product development & engineering team and strategic supplier engagements, which includes Broadcom and to build its Orion AI accelerator products.