Volantis Raises $88M Series A to Pack 220 Memory Chips Around a GPU With VCSEL Photonic Links

San Francisco startup Volantis closed an $88M Series A co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with John Doerr, VXI, Triatomic and Susa Ventures joining alongside angels Dwarkesh Patel, Naveen Rao and Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas. The company is building custom micro-VCSEL photonic interconnects — the vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers used in iPhone Face ID — to pack 220 memory chips around a GPU and run models above 20T parameters at 10,000 tokens per second per user, with first inference engines due in 2027.