Kandou AI, a Swiss semiconductor company that builds chip-to-chip interconnect technology, has raised $225 million in what it calls a Series A round, led by Maverick Silicon with strategic participation from SoftBank, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Alchip Technologies. The round values the company at $400 million. The label is worth pausing on: Kandou was founded in 2011 and previously raised more than $163 million across Series B and C rounds under the name Kandou Bus. The “Series A” designation reflects a rebrand and leadership change, not a fresh start.
The company’s new chief executive, Srujan Linga, a former Goldman Sachs managing director, took over in 2025 from founder Amin Shokrollahi, an EPFL professor of mathematics and computer science who invented the core technology. Shokrollahi’s contribution, a signalling method called Chord that sends correlated signals across multiple wires to increase bandwidth by a factor of two to four while halving power consumption, remains the technical foundation. The rebrand to Kandou AI and the repositioning toward artificial intelligence infrastructure is Linga’s doing, and it appears to have worked: the $225 million raise is the largest in the company’s history and brings SoftBank, one of the most aggressive AI infrastructure investors, onto the cap table.
The bet against light
What makes Kandou AI’s position unusual is not the problem it is trying to solve but the material it proposes to solve it with. The AI industry’s interconnect bottleneck is real and well documented. As models scale to hundreds of billions of parameters and training clusters expand to tens of thousands of GPUs, the speed at which data moves between processors and memory has become the binding constraint on performance. At signalling speeds of 224 gigabits per second, traditional copper interconnects consume roughly 30 per cent of total cluster power, with signal degradation so severe that reach is limited to less than a metre without amplification.
The prevailing industry response has been to move to optics. Ayar Labs raised $500 million in March 2026 at a $3.8 billion valuation for its co-packaged optical interconnects. Marvell completed a $3.25 billion acquisition of Celestial AI in February, buying photonic fabric technology that claims 25 times the bandwidth of copper alternatives at a tenth of the latency. The optical interconnect market for AI data centres is projected to grow from $3.75 billion in 2025 to $18.36 billion by 2033.
Kandou AI is betting that copper is not finished. Its Chord signalling technology, the company claims, can achieve path-to-Shannon-capacity efficiency, reducing power consumption and system costs by a factor of ten while extending copper links to 448 gigabits per second and beyond. If that claim holds, it would mean that the billions being spent on optical interconnect transitions are at least partially premature, and that existing copper infrastructure can be made to work for several more hardware generations at a fraction of the cost.
The strategic investors tell the story
The composition of the investor syndicate matters more than the headline figure. Synopsys and Cadence are the two dominant providers of electronic design automation tools. Their participation is not purely financial; it signals potential integration of Kandou AI’s serialiser/deserialiser intellectual property into the design flows that chip architects use to build processors and memory controllers. Alchip, a Taiwanese ASIC design services company, provides a path to manufacturing. SoftBank, which has invested more than $100 billion in AI-adjacent companies through its Vision Fund and direct investments, adds the scale capital and the strategic network.
The practical implication is that Kandou AI’s technology could appear inside chips designed by other companies rather than requiring customers to adopt Kandou’s own silicon. This is a licensing and IP model, similar in structure to Arm’s approach in mobile processors, and it is a more capital-efficient path to market dominance than manufacturing and selling chips directly. Whether Kandou can execute on that model with a $400 million valuation and $225 million in fresh capital, against optical competitors valued at ten times as much, is the central question.
The valuation gap
At $400 million, Kandou AI is valued at roughly a tenth of Ayar Labs and an eighth of what Marvell paid for Celestial AI. That gap could reflect market scepticism about copper’s longevity in AI infrastructure, or it could reflect the fact that Kandou’s technology, if it works as claimed, does not require the industry to rip out its existing wiring. Copper is already in every data centre. If Kandou’s signalling technology can make it fast enough for another generation of AI workloads, the adoption curve would be faster and cheaper than an optical transition.
The risk is that “another generation” may not be long enough. AI model sizes and training cluster scales are growing at a pace that consistently outstrips infrastructure predictions. What is adequate at 448 gigabits per second today may be inadequate at the terabit-per-second speeds that next-generation models will demand within two to three years. Optical interconnects, for all their cost and complexity, offer a higher theoretical ceiling.
Kandou AI’s $225 million buys it time to prove that the ceiling can wait. The company’s 15-year history and the technical credibility of Chord signalling, which has been deployed commercially in consumer electronics since the mid-2010s, lend substance to the bet. But the AI infrastructure market has a pattern of rewarding ambition over incrementalism, and a company arguing that the existing material is good enough faces a harder narrative sell than one promising to replace it entirely. The investors on this round appear to be betting on engineering pragmatism. Whether the market agrees will depend on how quickly the optical transition matures, and whether Kandou’s copper can keep pace with an industry that has shown little interest in waiting for anything.
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Cristian Dina