Foresight Ventures VCT invests £2.9m into Ayar Labs

Company background

Ayar Labs has developed a novel component for the next generation of semiconductors, to improve speed and increase bandwidth in new products. The company’s technology can improve bandwidth over existing providers by 1000x whilst only using 10% of the energy. The company is seeking to overcome the significant bottlenecks that are emerging as we continue to drive innovation within semiconductors, legacy technologies such as copper wire are not able to provide the next generation interconnect.

Ayar Labs was founded in 2015 out of MIT, developed by globally renowned leaders in optical interconnect computing. The team has been further strengthened over time with a senior commercial team from Intel and Penguin Computing. In 2024, Ayar Labs completed a $155 million funding round that valued the business at more than $1 billion. In 2026, Ayar Labs announced the closing of $500 million in Series E funding, raising the company’s valuation to $3.75 billion.

Investment

Foresight Ventures VCT first invested into the business in August 2020, co-leading the Series B financing with Blu Sky Labs. In aggregate, Foresight funds have invested £2.9m into the company. In addition to this investment, the Foresight investment team has introduced new investors to Ayar Labs to help provide further funding to the business. The deal was originally sourced through the investment team’s thematic research into the High-Performance Computing (“HPC”) sector and the company has secured investment from some of most prestigious VC funds globally including Playground Global, Intel Capital and Founders Fund.

The company continues to scale and has benefitted from the exponential increase in demand for generative Artificial Intelligence and HPC. The favourable market conditions has generated a wave of new customer engagements (e.g. Microsoft) and created a favourable funding environment for the business. Over the last two years, one of Foresight’s Venture Partners based in the US has been working closely with the company to provide advisory services on the strategic direction of the business and introduce the company to significant players in the semiconductor space. 

Exit options

Ayar Labs is a high performing asset and, consequently, the investment team believes that a number of exit and strategic options for the company will emerge over the next 2 years. There is currently meaningful secondary demand for Ayar Labs shares, providing early evidence that the company is emerging as a highly attractive asset that could enable VCT investors to generate an attractive return on investment.