Ayar Labs staff sold at over $5 billion; its first employee just raised $88 million to attack the memory wall
Antero Peak led a $225 million secondary that valued Ayar Labs above $5 billion, a third over its March mark and roughly 55 times estimated 2025 sales. Three weeks later, Ayar's first employee surfaced with $88 million for Volantis, a photonic shot at the memory wall next door.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Early hands took the exit
On 10 September 2026, as Ayar Labs announced a $150 million extension of its Series E, a second deal closed beside it that put no new money into the company. Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners led $225 million of share purchases from early employees and investors, with Sequoia Global Equities, ARK Invest and Greycroft joining, at a valuation above $5 billion, a third above Ayar's own March mark 12. The people who built the optical-chip maker sold, and a fund paid up.
Two marks, six months apart
The Series E closed on 3 March 2026: $500 million led by Neuberger Berman at a $3.75 billion valuation, $870 million raised all-time 2. The extension lifts 2026 primary capital to $650 million and total funding past $1 billion, and adds Wiwynn (TWSE: 6669) to a strategic roster already holding Nvidia, AMD, Intel, MediaTek and Alchip 12. Wiwynn had invested earlier in the year and paired the money in March with a plan for optically connected racks scaling past 1,024 accelerators 2.
The top mark buys no new faith
No dollar of the $5 billion reached Ayar; all of it reached Ayar's sellers. The multiple leans on a guess, too: one tracker estimates 2025 revenue at $91.6 million, which prices the exit near 55 times last year's sales 3. The money that matters is the $150 million, which CEO Mark Wade says must get every product qualified for volume production by end-2027, because customers ramp in 2028-29; it also opened a design center in Bengaluru 1.
Ayar's secondary print tops every public mark in merchant photonics
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Celestial AI (Marvell floor) | $3.25B |
| Ayar Labs (March primary) | $3.75B |
| Lightmatter (reported) | $4.4B |
| Ayar Labs (Sept secondary) | $5B+ |
The first employee went at the other wall
Roy Meade, employee number one at Ayar and once its VP of engineering, before that leader of Micron's HBM program, resurfaced on 1 October 2026 as co-founder and CTO of Volantis 5. The startup announced an $88 million Series A that day, co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, taking total funding to $97 million, with first integrated inference engines promised to customers in 2027 4.
Ayar wires chips to chips; Volantis points light at the memory wall. Its links use micro-VCSELs on gallium arsenide to reach past 200 millimeters, where copper taps out near five, pooling more than 220 memory chiplets 6. The company lists Sam Altman, Jeff Dean and SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel among its backers, and claims A-1 will run models beyond 20 trillion parameters at 10,000 tokens a second, at 15 times the tokens per dollar of Nvidia's Rubin; that last figure is a company claim no customer has confirmed 74.
One yardstick, three prices
Antero Peak's Chris Smith calls optical scale-up "poised to ramp through the end of the decade," a "major inflection point" in his words 1. The market half-agrees: Marvell (MRVL) agreed in December 2025 to pay at least $3.25 billion, and up to $5.5 billion on milestones, for Celestial AI, while Lightmatter's $4.4 billion Series D valuation rests on a single report 85. A secondary, though, prices only the shares that moved, and Ayar still needed $150 million more to reach its own finish line.
Two dates settle it
Watch Ayar's volume qualification by end-2027 and Volantis's first customer engines in 2027 14. If Wade makes the window, September's sellers left money on the table. If he misses it, they were the only ones who got the $5 billion price.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
