Two years ago, Lumilens didn’t exist. Today, it’s coming out of stealth with $900M raised, a valuation of $5.5 billion, a multi-billion dollar customer agreement, and its first product already shipping into a hyperscaler’s production data centers.
This is our third time partnering with Ankur Singla, and we worked with him on Lumilens from inception, leading their seed round in 2024 and participating in every round since. In Mayfield’s 56-year history, we’ve never seen execution and growth like this before.
Ankur is a first-principles founder who is fundamentally rethinking the entire AI stack. Here’s the problem Lumilens is solving: GPUs are no longer the hard part of scaling AI infrastructure. Connecting them is. At today’s bandwidth requirements, copper cabling hits a physical wall at about a meter and a half. As a result, optical AI connectivity has become the most important infrastructure opportunity to emerge after GPUs.
Lumilens designs and manufactures optical interconnects for both the scale-up and scale-out networks within AI infrastructure. Unique for a young AI company, it treats manufacturing as a product in its own right – from chip assembly to high-volume production.
In my latest Founder Insights newsletter, I break down why copper has hit a wall, why scale-out and scale-up networks are a new class of problem, and how fourth-time CEO Ankur Singla and the Lumilens team are building the new picks-and-shovels layer of the $7T Hardware Renaissance.
