Image credit: Staera
Staera Semiconductor announced on November 10, 2026, that it has emerged from stealth with $4.6M in pre-seed funding. Openspace Capital led the round. SGInnovate, Black Kite Capital, 28 Holdings, In Group, and Decimus Technologies also participated. The company was previously known as New Silicon Corporation (NSC).
Staera is developing Lightwire, an optical interconnect that builds the light source and the rest of the data link inside a silicon chip. The company says this targets the problem now limiting how fast and how large AI systems can grow: moving data between chips.
According to Staera, copper’s electrical performance drops by a factor of a thousand between one millimeter and one meter. Those are the distances that connect chips, boards, and racks. Lightwire replaces those copper links with light generated on the chip itself.
Staera points to rising energy demand as the reason the problem is urgent. The company cites the International Energy Agency’s projection that data center electricity use will grow from about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. It also notes that Nvidia, which said in 2025 it would stay with copper as long as it could, now plans to use both copper and optics in its AI systems.
Most optical links today use lasers or LEDs made separately and attached next to the chip. Staera says it fabricates the light source and every other part of the link inside commercial silicon wafers. It calls Lightwire the first and only optical interconnect built fully into the chip. Its chips combine silicon CMOS circuits, GaN LED light sources, and silicon nitride waveguides that route light between links. The company says it has built GaN LEDs into silicon chips in commercial foundries since 2016, with processes that now run at 98 to 99 percent yield.
Lightwire is built inside the bridge or interposer chip that already connects processors and memory in current AI hardware, so Staera says it works with existing packaging. The company’s stated design figures include: 4 to 8 Gbps per link, with more than 600 links per millimeter of chip edge; under 0.2 pJ/bit, compared with 5 pJ/bit for co-packaged optics; reach beyond 50 mm, compared with 2 mm for UCIe-A die-to-die links; under 50 watts to move 24 terabytes of data per second, compared with nearly a kilowatt using co-packaged optics; and lightwire-based HBM designed to exceed 24 TB/s, compared with 2.8 TB/s per HBM4 stack today.
CEO Dr Andrew Kim said bolt-on optics add power and complexity, while Staera’s approach makes the connection smaller, cooler, and faster with each generation. He said the funding takes Lightwire from the lab to customers.
Hian Goh, Co-Founder of Openspace Capital, said the firm backed Staera for the strength of its technology and team. He also cited its potential to define a new category in semiconductor connectivity.
The pre-seed round marks the company’s shift from research to commercial product. Staera will use the funding to advance its technology, expand its team, and deepen engagement with customers and supply chain partners. It is targeting commercial release in 2030.
The company has also won recognition in competitions. In May 2026, it won 3rd place in the ECTC Start-up Competition at the IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference. The same month, it was runner-up at the 2026 Lam Capital Venture Competition, run by Lam Research in Fremont, California.
Performance figures, yield rates, and the first-and-only claim are the company’s own and come from Staera’s press release. They are design targets rather than independently verified results, and the product is not expected to reach the market until 2030.
