Celero Communications, an Irvine, California company that designs coherent digital signal processor (DSP) chips for optical links in AI infrastructure, raised $275m in a Series C round, it announced on 9 September 2026. The round valued the company at more than $3bn.
Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund, led the round. Existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon also took part. The new money brings Celero's total funding to $415m.
As part of the deal, Gavin Baker, managing partner and chief investment officer at Atreides Management, will join Celero's board. James Luo, a general partner at CapitalG, already sits on it.
“AI infrastructure is rapidly outgrowing the capabilities of traditional optical interconnect architectures.”Nariman Yousefi, Co-founder and CEO, Celero Communications
What Celero does
Celero was founded in 2024 by executives who previously worked at Marvell, Inphi, Broadcom and ClariPhy. Nariman Yousefi is co-founder and chief executive, and Oscar Agazzi is a co-founder, according to the company's Series B announcement. Besides its Irvine headquarters, it has design centres in Canada and Argentina. It has not disclosed its headcount.
Its chips handle the signal processing in coherent optical connections, which carry data over fibre within and between data centres. Celero argues that the PAM4 optical systems widely used today are reaching their practical limits in bandwidth density and fibre scalability as AI clusters grow, and that coherent technology will be needed for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across networks.
Alongside the funding, the company said it had validated what it calls the industry's first 2nm coherent DSP silicon, combining digital processing with advanced analog technology. It said the design gives it a path from 1.6T connections to next-generation 3.2T optical interconnects. SiliconANGLE reported that the chip is built on TSMC's 2-nanometre process. The validation is the company's own claim, and it has not announced shipping products based on the chip.
Who invested
The three lead investors were not new to Celero. Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management were listed among its investors when it announced its Series B in November 2025, a round that CapitalG led.
"Every data center will need coherent optics, no matter the accelerator or networking protocol," Baker said in the release. Luo said Celero's 2nm technology provides the optical foundation that lets AI infrastructure scale up and across large data centres.
What the money is for
Celero said the financing will speed up its product roadmap, R&D investment and production readiness as demand grows for higher-bandwidth, lower-power optical connections in AI infrastructure.
"This investment gives us the resources to accelerate our roadmap, strengthen production readiness and bring the next generation of coherent connectivity to market faster," Yousefi said in the announcement. The company cited McKinsey projections that global data centres will need nearly $7 trillion of investment by 2030, about $5.2 trillion of it for AI workloads.
The funding so far
Celero's earlier rounds were raised in quick succession. Its seed and Series A rounds totalled $40m and were led by Sutter Hill Ventures, and in November 2025 it announced a $100m Series B led by CapitalG, taking its total at that point to $140m.
The Series C nearly triples that total less than a year later. The company has not disclosed revenue or customers.
Company website: celero.inc