Lucidean announced that Dr. James Raring has joined as Chief Executive Officer and that the company has raised $18 million in Seed financing. The Seed funding was co-led by Entrada Ventures and Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), with participation from Foothill Ventures, M Ventures, Cerberus Ventures, and Raptor Group. With this Seed funding and strong syndicate, Lucidean will expand R&D efforts, validate the performance and efficiency of the CohZero™ platform, and accelerate productization.

Lucidean is redefining data-center optics with CohZero™, a coherent-lite architecture that delivers coherent-class reach and signal integrity at IMDD-like power and cost. Founded in Santa Barbara by veterans of compound-semiconductor photonics and advanced optical link design, Lucidean is developing 3.2 Tbps and 6.4 Tbps transceivers for AI-driven fabrics and data-center interconnects.