March 2025 deals were headlined by another large AI compute interconnect deal as Celestial AI (Santa Clara, CA) raised a $250M Series C1 at a $2.5B valuation. Fidelity Management & Research led with BlackRock, Maverick Silicon, Tiger Global Management, and Lip-Bu Tan, as well as several previous investors participating. The company is focused on optical scale-up networks for accelerated computing leveraging silicon photonics and advanced packaging.
Also focused on interconnecting AI compute, CamGraPhIC (Cambridge, U.K.), a startup developing graphene-based transceivers, raised €25M ($27.9M) in Series A funding led by CDP Venture Capital and joined by several others including NATO Innovation Fund and Sony Innovation Fund.
Finally, Zero Point Motion (Bristol, U.K.) closed a £4M ($5.1M) pre-Series A funding round from SCVC, Foresight Group, and Verve Ventures to combine silicon photonics and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) for low-cost and low-noise accelerometers and gyroscopes, a quickly growing area of interest for investment.