University of Colorado spinout optics firm Polaris raises $50M

CARLSBAD, California — Polaris Electro-Optics Inc., a California-headquartered University of Colorado spinout with operations in Boulder, recently raised a $50 million Series B round to scale production of its FenGlass chip components for use in artificial-intelligence datacenters. 

“As AI workloads exponentially grow in the agentic era, data movement has become a crucial bottleneck in AI infrastructure,” the company said in a news release. “Not only are networks severely bandwidth constrained, but energy consumption per bit is also unsustainable. To address these challenges, hyperscalers, neoclouds, and infrastructure providers are attempting to scale both the data rate per lane and the number of lanes.”

The Series B fundraiser was led by Walden Catalyst Ventures.

“New electro-optic materials have been failing the same test for decades: they work in the lab but fail in the fab,” Walden partner Andy Kau said in the release. “What convinced us about Polaris is that FenGlass goes onto a finished silicon photonics wafer using processes a contract manufacturer already runs. Performance and reliability are table stakes. The ease of integration and the path to scale are why we led this round.”

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