Volantis Raises $88M Series A to Build Photonic AI Inference System

Volantis, a San Francisco semiconductor company building a new category of AI inference system, announced an $88 million Series A on October 1, 2026, co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, to fund development and commercialization of its photonic A-1 system. The round drew participation from John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic and Susa Ventures, with angel investors Dwarkesh Patel, Naveen Rao and Sholto Douglas also joining.

Volantis said the financing brings its total funds raised to $97 million to date, a total that includes backing from Sam Altman, Jeff Dean, Dylan Patel and John Doerr, among others. The company said the new capital will support development and commercialization of A-1 and its photonic memory architecture, including expanding its engineering team and moving the system toward customer deployments.

Volantis plans to deliver its first integrated inference engines to customers in 2027. Chief executive and co-founder Tapa Ghosh said current hardware forces a tradeoff between running the largest, most sophisticated models and running them fast, and that Volantis was started to eliminate that tradeoff. He added that as AI agents take on…