About Volantis
Volantis is a San Francisco startup building computing hardware that links processors to memory with light instead of copper wires. It uses micro-VCSELs, tiny lasers that emit light from the chip surface, in place of the separate external lasers used by most optical links. The aim is to let one GPU connect to far more memory chips than a conventional layout allows, which matters for running large AI models. The company was founded in 2022 and is led by chief executive Tapa Ghosh. Its first inference systems are not yet shipping.
Volantis was founded in 2022 and is based in San Francisco, CA, United States. It is listed under Photonic Computing. Reported funding is $9M seed (Jun 2025; backers incl. Alex Wang, Trevor Blackwell, Sam Altman).
Compute Technologies
- Photonics
What Volantis works on
Photonic Computing
Photonic computing uses light instead of electricity to carry or process information. Photons have no charge, so light in a waveguide does not cause the resistive heating that current in a wire does, though lasers and modulators still use power, and many wavelengths can share one waveguide. The industry has two quite different parts: moving data with light, and computing with light.
Also in United States
II-VI/Finisar (now Coherent), Celestial AI, Lightwave Logic, Inphi (now Marvell), Lumentum
