The round was led by Boardman Bay Capital Management to drive the commercialization of its breakthrough optical I/O solution. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA entered this investment round, joining existing strategic investors Applied Ventures LLC, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures. Other new strategic and financial investors participating in the round include Agave SPV, Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Tyche Partners. They join existing investors such as BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, Playground Global, and TechU Venture Partners.

Ayar Labs is disrupting the traditional performance, cost, and efficiency curves of the semiconductor and computing industries by driving a 1000x improvement in interconnect bandwidth density at 10x lower power. Ayar Labs' patented approach uses industry standard cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high density, low power optical based interconnect 'chiplets' and lasers to replace traditional electrical-based I/O.