PicoJool has closed a $27.5 million Series A round, bringing total funding to $39.5 million after an earlier $12 million seed round, as the VCSEL specialist pushes its optical link products toward customer qualification and production.

The company will spend the money expanding its teams and facilities in the US and Taiwan, growing R&D, operations, sales and marketing organizations as it moves its chip-level VCSEL and microVCSEL products into active optical cable (AOC) and near-package optics (NPO) modules.

"Reaching 200G per lane proved that the performance is there, our focus now is execution," said Al Yuen, founder and CEO of PicoJool. "This funding allows us to qualify products with customers and move a complete portfolio from chip-level VCSELs and microVCSELs into AOC and NPO modules."

From lab demos to shipping silicon

The funding round follows PicoJool's June unveiling of its 200G VCSEL and MicroVCSEL product family aimed at scale-up AI data centers. The 200G devices exceed 37GHz of bandwidth. The portfolio spans quad 100G, quad 200G and 32x50G NRZ MicroVCSEL configurations, giving customers multiple paths to 1.6T connectivity depending on their bandwidth, power and system requirements.

The company has started early sampling of its chip-level VCSEL products ahead of broader availability.

PicoJool's roadmap targets optical connectivity scaling from 800G to 1.6T, 3.2T and beyond. Customer interest is concentrated in the MicroVCSEL line: a 50G NRZ configuration for optical compute interconnects and 64G NRZ/PAM4 configurations aimed at PCIe 6.0-based NPO applications.

The MicroVCSEL platform uses a massively parallel architecture to raise aggregate bandwidth while cutting the energy needed to move each bit of data. That power-per-bit constraint has become a gating factor for hyperscale AI systems, where electrical interconnects struggle to keep pace with the bandwidth demands of large GPU clusters.

Manufacturing ties

On the production side, PicoJool is working with WIN Semiconductor and other GaAs foundries to ready its 200G VCSELs for volume manufacturing. The choice of established III-V foundries rather than in-house fabrication spreads capital costs and gives the company access to qualified GaAs processes — a common model for fabless photonics suppliers serving data center customers.

The dual US-Taiwan footprint aligns with where the company's foundry partners and data center customers sit, and positions it within the East Asian optical component supply chain that dominates VCSEL and transceiver manufacturing.

The competitive stakes are high. Multimode VCSEL-based links have historically offered lower-cost, lower-power alternatives to single-mode silicon photonics for short-reach data center interconnects, and pushing VCSELs to 100G and now 200G per lane keeps that option viable as switch and accelerator port speeds climb from 800G to 1.6T. PicoJool's parallel MicroVCSEL approach bets that scaling many lower-speed lanes beats pushing single lanes harder on energy efficiency.

With sampling underway, foundry engagement in progress and $39.5 million in total funding, PicoJool's next milestone is converting customer interest in its 50G NRZ and 64G PAM4 MicroVCSEL configurations into qualified design wins across 800G-to-3.2T optical links.