Volantis, a semiconductor startup building photonically integrated computers for AI, has emerged from stealth with a $9 million seed round. The round includes backing from Alex Wang of Scale AI and Trevor Blackwell of Y Combinator. Founded in 2022, Volantis is scaling a new class of photonic compute architecture that moves beyond the limitations of silicon photonics. The company uses direct laser modulation and wafer-scale integration to enable ultra-efficient communication across highly connected compute systems. According to Volantis, the architecture packs the power of a server rack into a chip-scale package, reducing energy consumption and cost while dramatically increasing compute speed. The company has already built working, patent-pending prototypes. Rather than traditional chip interconnects, Volantis uses energy-efficient optical channels — using parallelism to deliver high aggregate bandwidth with high efficiency — to address the issue of bandwidth and power required to move data between chips that continues to hinder AI compute. While photonics has long been seen as the answer, silicon photonics has consistently failed to scale inside systems, according to Volantis. According to the company, its breakthrough comes from integrating directly modulated lasers with on-chip optical waveguides — an approach that enables many slow, low-powered links to work in parallel, similar to the architectural advantage GPUs have in compute. The Volantis team brings together optical and hardware engineering talent from companies including Ayar Labs, Lightmatter, Marvell, Rockley, Infinera, Lumentum, Juniper, Skorpios, and others. Roy Meade, co-founder and CTO of Volantis, was the first employee and former vice president of engineering at Ayar Labs and previously led high bandwidth memory development at Micron.