Volantis raises $88M to break the memory wall with photonics, eyeing 10,000 tok/s inference

dunkhippo33 · x · 2026-10-01

Volantis announced an $88M Series A led by Lachy Groom and Abstract ($97M total), with backing from Sam Altman, Jeff Dean, Dylan Patel, and John Doerr, to attack AI's memory bottleneck with photonics.
Today's tradeoff: on-chip SRAM gives bandwidth but little capacity; HBM gives capacity but low bandwidth. Volantis's new optical interconnect class boosts both memory capacity and bandwidth by over an order of magnitude, with optical memory pooling lowering $/token.
Claims: ultra-fast inference (up to 10,000 tok/s/user) for >10T-parameter models, coding agents finishing tasks in seconds instead of hours, entire codebases in context windows, and a structural restart of scaling laws.

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