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Astera Labs
2020/04/24
Astera Labs Poised for Rapid Growth with Series B Funding and Manufacturing Partnerships in Place
Aries Smart Retimers gaining significant industry traction with cloud and HPC customers; Sutter Hill Ventures and Intel Capital investments boost market momentum, new product development.
Astera Labs, a pioneer in connectivity solutions for intelligent systems, today announced that it has closed its Series B funding with renowned technology investors including Sutter Hill Ventures, Intel Capital, Avigdor Willenz, and Ron Jankov. This investment round, along with a strategic collaboration with TSMC for manufacturing, positions Astera Labs to rapidly scale production of its Aries Smart Retimer, the world’s first Smart Retimer Portfolio for PCI Express® (PCIe®) 4.0 and 5.0 solutions, and to accelerate development of additional product lines for Compute Express Link™ (CXL) solutions.
“We are very proud of the significant industry traction for our Aries Smart Retimer Portfolio which has been extensively tested with all major CPU, GPU and PCIe 4.0 endpoints,” said Jitendra Mohan, CEO, Astera Labs. “We look forward to accelerating this momentum by partnering with such a distinguished group of technology and manufacturing heavyweights to develop purpose-built connectivity solutions for data-centric systems.”
Watch Astera Labs’ overview video here.
Highlights
- Sutter Hill Ventures (SHV) has a proven record for building market-leading technology companies by partnering with entrepreneurs to go after big problems that are worth solving. SHV is integral in helping Astera Labs continue to scale and grow its position as a leader in the cloud, big data and enterprise data center industries.
- “Astera Labs is an exciting company on the threshold of major growth as it ramps up production of its connectivity solutions to meet the industry’s demands for more and more bandwidth,” said Stefan Dyckerhoff, managing director, Sutter Hill Ventures. “With a focus on cutting-edge technology and a long list of early customer adopters, the company is a perfect fit for our technology portfolio, and we look forward to working closely with the Astera team to support this critical growth phase.”
- Intel Capital invests in leading disruptors in a wide range of emerging technologies and is one of the top venture firms in supporting artificial intelligence and big data applications.
- “Astera Labs’ innovative technology is in alignment with Intel’s strategy to accelerate processing for CPUs and purpose-built accelerators for the next generation of data-centric platforms that support emerging applications,” said Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director, Intel Capital. “Astera Labs is the industry leader with its first-to-market Aries Smart Retimers for PCIe 4.0, 5.0, and Compute Express Link technology, enabling systems designers to double the signal reach at speeds required for today’s applications. We’re excited to be strategic investors and technology partners with Astera Labs to enable these emerging ecosystems.”
- “Heterogeneous computing and workload-optimized platforms are driving the need for faster and lower-latency interconnects in data-centric systems,” said Zane Ball, corporate vice president and general manager, Data Platforms Engineering & Architecture, Intel Corporation. “We’re pleased to continue our collaboration with Astera Labs to support accelerated scale with the delivery of their PCIe solutions today and emerging CXL solutions tomorrow.”
- Avigdor Willenz and his investment group are first investors in Astera Labs, bringing to the company broad technical expertise in systems architecture and semiconductor-based solutions for the most demanding data center applications, such as artificial intelligence, converged high performance networking and storage, and next-generation cloud infrastructure. Willenz previously founded Galileo Technology Ltd. (acquired by Marvell Semiconductor), and was the lead investor of Annapurna Labs (acquired by Amazon Web Services), and Habana Labs (recently acquired by Intel).
- “Astera Labs is primed and ready to grow rapidly, as it delivers solutions that enable the expanding AI ecosystem,” said Willenz. “Its mission to innovate exponentially, rather than incrementally, aligns with my own approach of building companies that create the technologies that change our world.”
- For manufacturing and operations, Astera Labs has partnered with TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, to leverage its industry-leading process technologies at scale and to bring the Aries Smart Retimer solution to market quickly.
“We look forward to our continued collaboration with Astera Labs, which will help to advance its capacity to deliver cloud-optimized solutions for a growing list of customers,” said Bradford Paulsen, senior vice president of business management, TSMC North America. (Source: Astera Labs website)
