Singapore-based Openspace Capital led the pre-seed round as the San Francisco startup emerged from stealth; Staera targets commercial shipments of its Lightwire technology in 2030.
Staera Semiconductor emerged from stealth on 10 November with $4.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Openspace Capital for Lightwire, a planned optical connection between chip components. The company, formerly called New Silicon Corporation, describes the financing as a step from research toward a commercial product.
SGInnovate, Black Kite Capital, 28 Holdings, In Group and financial software company Decimus Technologies also joined the round, SiliconANGLE said.
Superintelligence (SI) accelerators can contain several chiplets, separate pieces of silicon that perform specialized tasks. Small connecting chips called interposers or bridges typically use copper wiring to move data between them.
Staera says Lightwire is designed to replace those copper connections with optical links built into the connecting chip. Gallium-nitride LEDs generate light, while silicon-nitride waveguides—tiny paths that carry light—route it alongside the chip’s circuits. The company says the design works with existing chip packaging.
CEO Andrew Kim says moving data, rather than computing it, is the bottleneck for SI hardware: copper performance deteriorates over distances from millimeters to meters, while separately attached optical components add power use and complexity.
In its announcement, Staera gave figures of 4 to 8 gigabits per second per link and more than 600 links per millimeter of chip edge. It also said high-bandwidth memory using Lightwire is designed to exceed 24 terabytes per second, compared with 2.8 terabytes per second for a current HBM4 memory stack. The latter is a design target, not a demonstrated result.
Openspace co-founder Hian Goh said the fund backed Staera for its technology, team and potential in semiconductor connectivity. He said integrated optical links could offer a path to faster, more efficient and more scalable SI systems.
Staera says it has built gallium-nitride LEDs into silicon chips at commercial foundries since 2016, using processes that now achieve 98–99 percent yield. It plans to use the funding to advance Lightwire, expand its US team and develop its manufacturing supply chain, as well as deepen work with customers and supply-chain partners ahead of its targeted release.
The San Francisco company plans to use the Series D funding to expand training and testing of superintelligence agents on professional tasks.
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