Kandou AI raises USD 225 million to solve AI’s data movement bottleneck

Saint-Sulpice-based fabless semiconductor company Kandou AI has closed an oversubscribed USD 225 million Series A financing round. The round was led by Maverick Silicon, with strategic participation from SoftBank Group, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Alchip Technologies, alongside several existing investors.

The funding addresses one of the central challenges in modern AI infrastructure: as AI models scale exponentially, the bottleneck is no longer compute power but the speed and efficiency with which data moves between processors and memory. Traditional interconnect technologies, designed for pre-AI workloads, cannot meet the bandwidth demands of today’s GPU clusters and hyperscale data centers. Kandou AI’s silicon-proven interconnect technology, built on patented signaling and SerDes architectures derived from information theory, is purpose-built to solve this constraint, delivering breakthrough improvements in bandwidth, reach, and energy efficiency over copper interconnects.

The new capital will fund the manufacturing ramp-up of Kandou AI’s high-performance connectivity chips, deepen partnerships with hyperscale and AI infrastructure customers globally, and advance the company’s next-generation chip and IP portfolio targeting multi-terabit connectivity beyond the 448G barrier.

The raise marks a significant step in the evolution of a company with deep Western Switzerland roots. Originally spun out of EPFL in 2011 as Kandou Bus, the company raised USD 72 million in a Series E round in 2023 to commercialize its Regli PCIe 5.0 retimer product. Now rebranded as Kandou AI, the company has shipped over 20 million silicon units using its technology and recently expanded its global engineering footprint with a new design center in Hyderabad, India.