Adam Grosser

Big milestone for Ayar Labs — $500M Series E at a $3.75B valuation. This raise underscores just how critical optical I/O and co-packaged optics (CPO) have become in the AI and HPC era. As compute scales, the bottleneck is no longer just processing — it’s moving massive amounts of data efficiently, with lower power and latency. That’s where Ayar’s photonics platform is positioned to fundamentally reshape system architecture. Notably, this round combines top-tier institutional investors (Neuberger Berman, ARK, Insight, QIA, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, 1789 Capital) alongside strategic leaders like AMD, MediaTek, NVIDIA, and Alchip. That mix of financial and commercial backers signals both capital confidence and ecosystem pull. The focus now: scaling high-volume production and test capacity to accelerate deployment of their CPO solution. Moving from breakthrough technology to manufacturing scale is the real unlock. Congrats to the Ayar Labs team on continuing to push the semiconductor and photonics frontier forward. #optical #photonics #semiconductor #AI #HPC

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Hexcel Adds Independent Director in Deal With Activist Investor "Hexcel added a new independent director to its board in a move that avoids a potential proxy fight for the aerospace materials company with activist investor Vision One Fund. "As part of an agreement between the two sides, Vision One will withdraw their nominees to the board that were to be voted on at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Vision One will also support Hexcel's board nominees, and agree to certain standstill restrictions and mutual non-disparagement provisions, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. "The new director, former Kaman Chief Executive Officer Neal Keating, was appointed effective Tuesday." Keating's experience in aerospace may make him an ideal director choice. Yet from a bigger picture perspective, I wonder if this settlement is the right move for investors. More and more activist campaigns are settling rather than running the full process of a proxy fight with typically a greater number of directors nominated by the activist. Hopefully, activists are becoming like the public company boards they battle, i.e. more focused on reaching consensus than big results. #governancearbitrage #proxyfights #corporategovernance #activistinvesting #valuecreation https://lnkd.in/gazBUGFp

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Folks greatly underestimate the massive lead in robotics safety that Agility Robotics/$CCXI has accrued 👇 Your robot can do all the backflips in the world but if it can’t hand a box or automotive part safely to a human colleague, it’s just the world’s most expensive YouTube actor…

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As AI workloads eat up global computing supply, DRAM prices are surging like never before—creating major challenges for teams trying to plan out their data center spend. One of my portfolio companies, Mext, is addressing the largest cost component in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM). From being on the board of Redis for the last twelve years, I’ve learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new AI techniques, for dramatically reducing the amount of server-DRAM required to run applications, all while maintaining performance. It intelligently manages the server’s memory, keeping hot pages (i.e., those in use by applications) in fast DRAM and offloading cold pages (i.e., those less used) to a much less expensive memory tier (e.g., NVMe Flash). Key to the approach is ensuring cold memory pages that are about to be accessed by an application are back in DRAM before the application needs them or notices that they were gone. This is done without modifications to the application or the OS – so it can run in the cloud or on-premise. Mext thus allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. They're hosting a webinar along with Fred Weber (former CTO of AMD) on Jan 22nd at 10am pacific time. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/gXe9GCeE

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