Singapore's Staera Semiconductor Raises $4.6M to Put Light Inside AI Chips

Singapore-based Staera Semiconductor has raised US$4.6 million in pre-seed funding to build optical data links directly into silicon chips — a bet that copper wiring has hit its ceiling in AI hardware.

The company, formerly known as New Silicon Corporation, announced the round on Wednesday. Openspace Capital led the round, with participation from SGInnovate, Black Kite Capital, 28 Holdings, In Group, and Decimus Technologies.

Why replace copper with light?

Staera says its technology attacks a bottleneck that now limits AI system growth: moving data between chips. Copper wiring loses electrical performance sharply across the millimeter-to-meter distances that connect chips, boards, and racks. The company's first product, Lightwire, replaces those copper links with light generated inside the chip itself — using the same process and the same wafer as the chip's circuits.

That integration matters for packaging. Lightwire sits inside the bridge or interposer chip that already links processors and memory in AI hardware, so it works with existing packaging rather than demanding a redesign.

What are the performance targets?

The company's design targets are aggressive on both energy and throughput:

• Move data using less than a tenth of the energy consumed by today's best optical links.
• Move 24 TB per second on under 50 W — against nearly 1 kW for co-packaged optics.

The power argument connects to a much larger curve. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data center electricity use can rise from about 415 TWh in 2024 to about 945 TWh by 2030. Staera argues that copper simply cannot carry more data further without consuming more of that power, and that Lightwire is built precisely for that task.

Where did the company come from?

Staera began as a spin-off from the Low Energy Electronic Systems research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). The new round funds the company's move from research to a commercial product, with plans to expand the team into the United States and work with customers and supply-chain partners.

The company is targeting a commercial release in 2030 — a timeline that puts Lightwire's market entry roughly in step with the IEA's projected doubling of data center power draw. For chipmakers and AI system builders hunting energy savings at every layer of the stack, Staera's wager is that the wiring itself becomes the product.