Celestial AI

Celestial AI is a machine learning (ML) accelerator company developing the Photonic Fabric platform, an optical interconnect technology for memory and compute. Celestial AI aims to enable the next generation of high-performance computing (HPC) and ML hardware. The Photonic Fabric platform combines advances in photonics, high-speed mixed-signal design, and packaging to deliver data to any point on the die. Celestial AI states this allows it to deliver more bandwidth at lower power and latency compared to competing technology.

Celestial AI's technology uses light for data movement, both within a chip and between chips. It integrates photonics into accelerators for AI workloads to address challenges moving data to and from compute hardware as AI models scale past what can be kept on the die of any one memory chip. Celestial AI founder and CEO described the company's platform:

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.

Photonic Fabric is protocol adaptive and supports industry standards including CXL, JEDEC (HBM) and is compatible with interfaces like PCIe, UCIe and other proprietary interconnects. Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric technology is available for licensing. The company is partnering with and developing a comprehensive ecosystem of compute, memory, and other silicon products based on Photonic Fabric.

Celestial AI was founded in 2020 by Preet Virk (COO), David Lazovsky (CEO), and Michelle Tomasko. The company was originally named Inorganic Intelligence before rebranding to Celestial AI. Lazovsky and Virk stated they realized that AI and machine learning workloads would soon hit a “data movement” problem, with current hardware unable to transfer data fast enough to scale with AI models as they move past what could be kept on one memory chip. The company's solution, developed by Phil Winterbottom (CTO), is an optical interconnect technology for compute-to-compute, compute-to-memory, and on-chip data transmission. Winterbottom was previously a researcher at Bell Labs. Celestial AI started to commercialize this technology, starting as a portfolio company of VC Firm The Engine. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with locations in Irvine, California, Toronto, and Hyderabad, India.

SEC forms from August 26, 2020, and May 1, 2021, show Celestial AI raised $5 million and £2.9 million, respectively. On February 4, 2022, Celestial AI announced a $56 million series A investment led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) with participation from Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund, The Engine, Tyche Partners, Merck’s corporate venture fund (M-Ventures), IMEC XPand, and venture capital investor in the Princeton University ecosystem, Fitz Gate. On June 28, 2023, Celestial AI announced a $100 million series B funding round led by IAG Capital Partners, KDT, and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund. Other investors in the round include Samsung Catalyst, Smart Global Holdings (SGH), Porsche Automobil Holding SE, The Engine Fund, imec.xpand, M Ventures, and Tyche Partners.