Celero Communications announced a $275 million Series C funding round that places the networking chip startup's valuation at over $3 billion. The financing was led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and CapitalG, with participation from existing investors, including Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon.
The Irvine, California-based company, which develops coherent digital signal processing (DSP) technology aimed at AI infrastructure, has now raised $415 million in aggregate capital. As part of the new financing, Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Atreides Management, will take a seat on Celero's board of directors.
Celero said it has validated what it describes as the industry’s first 2nm coherent DSP silicon, a milestone that includes both DSP processing and advanced analog capabilities. The company positioned that work as a foundation for next-generation AI optical interconnects, targeting connectivity ranges from 1.6T through 3.2T to serve scaling hyperscale AI clusters and cloud data centers.
The announcement cited broader industry needs as context. Global data centers are projected to require nearly $7 trillion in investment by 2030, including roughly $5.2 trillion to support AI workloads, according to McKinsey & Company. Celero emphasized that connectivity is increasingly a critical constraint as AI infrastructure grows, and asserted that traditional PAM4 optical architectures are approaching practical limits in bandwidth density and fiber scalability.
Celero said the new capital will accelerate its product roadmap, expand R&D investment and advance production readiness to meet growing demand for higher-bandwidth, lower-power optical connectivity across next-generation AI infrastructure. The company was founded in 2024 by industry veterans from Marvell, Inphi, Broadcom and ClariPhy, and maintains design centers in Canada and Argentina.
The funding and technical milestone are presented as steps toward addressing anticipated capacity needs in AI-dedicated data centers, with the company positioning coherent DSP silicon as an enabler for denser, higher-throughput optical links. Celero did not provide additional commercialization timelines in its statement.