Eridu emerges from stealth with $200M Series A to solve AI networking bottlenecks

AI network startup Eridu emerges from stealth with hefty $200M Series A | TechCrunch

Drew Perkins has been inventing computer network tech and building startups since the dawn of the internet age. Now he's back as a co-founder and CEO of AI networking startup Eridu that's officially coming out of stealth on Tuesday with an oversubscribed $200 million Series A round. The round was led by Socratic Partners, renowned VC John Doerr, Matter Venture Partners, and others. Eridu has now raised a total of $230 million, the company said. Perkins began his career in the 1980s, and helped create the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) that became a key part of TCP/IP, the protocol upon which the internet relies. In 1999, the optical switch company he co-founded, Lightera Networks, was sold to Ciena for over $500 million. Next was Infinera, which IPO'd and was later sold to Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2025. He also co-founded Gainspeed (also sold to Nokia) and, most recently, the AR startup Mojo Vision. But after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Perkins had an epiphany. In February 2023, Perkins and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were speaking at a small conference. They got to chatting, and "Sam told me that what enabled AI and ChatGPT was just enormous amounts of compute. At which time, I think he meant 4,000 GPUs, but now we're talking about millions of GPUs," Perkins told TechCrunch. He realized from that conversation that the bottleneck to progress won't just be access to more chips; it will be the methods the chips use to communicate with one another across their systems. "What we needed to do in the networking sector, in the networking industry, was come up with a brand-new way of thinking about how you build networks and build network equipment, network chips, and the entire thing." By late 2023, Perkins had met his co-founder, Omar Hassen, whose roots are in networking chip design for the big industry players like Broadcom and Marvell. In 2024, they founded Eridu. They began to rethink computer networking from scratch starting with the silicon, meaning new chips designed for AI that integrate more networking functionality. Eridu will eventually sell complete systems that take the spot in an AI data center that a classic network gear provider, like Arista Networks, takes in a classic data center. These systems will replace many tiered optical connections with on-chip communications. Today, when more networking is needed, more boxes are added, which increases the number of hops each data bit may have to travel and increases latency - which contributes to that delay between typing in a prompt and getting a reply. Eridu is working on a switch that puts more functions on the chip itself. "So now I'm saving a ton of power, I'm saving a ton of cost, and then my network is much more reliable because the optics are the least reliable part of the network," Perkins said. "GPU compute and memory bandwidth are improving by roughly 10x per year, while data center switches from Broadcom, Marvell, Cisco, etc. are still only improving 2-3x every 2-3 years," Perkins added. The founders made a few calls to VCs who Perkins has known over the years and landed Wen Hsieh as a key investor. Hsieh is the founding managing partner of Matter Venture Partners and previously helped lead Kleiner Perkins' China investing group. Hsieh told Doerr about Eridu, after which the legendary former Kleiner Perkins investor (who had backed one of Perkins' previous startups) also wanted in. That set off a VC frenzy. "My phone has been ringing off the hook," Perkins said. "It's been a fun time raising money for this venture ... we're very oversubscribed." Perkins would not comment on valuation except to say that it is comparable to others raising this much in a Series A round and that he feels it's not too low, nor too high. He wants his 100 or so current employees to do well on their stock options. He also declined to comment on whether the startup had achieved unicorn status (valued at over $1 billion). Needless to say, if Eridu can deliver on its promise to create a new kind of AI-friendly networking chip and system, it will be in the middle of the largest data center build-out in history. And, unlike a vibe-coded product built by a 20-something college dropout, Eridu's founders have something increasingly rare in Silicon Valley these days: deep experience. All of that bodes well for the company's future. Other leads in the round include Hudson River Trading and Capricorn Investment Group, with participation by SBVA, MediaTek, Bosch Ventures, TDK Ventures, Eclipse and VentureTech Alliance (an investing vehicle of chip fab giant TSMC), among others.

With $200M in funding, Eridu wants to break through the network wall holding back AI - SiliconANGLE

With $200M in funding, Eridu wants to break through the network wall holding back AI Eridu Corp. wants to break through the artificial intelligence networking "wall" after raising $200 million in early-stage funding today. The money from the Series A round will help it to commercialize an all-new network switch that promises to scale AI workloads to unprecedented heights. Today's round was led by Socratic Partners, venture capitalist John Doerr, Hudson River Trading, Capricorn Investment Group and Matter Venture Partners. It also saw participation from some major players in the chipmaking industry, including MediaTek Inc. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which invested through its VentureTech Alliance investment vehicle. Chief Executive Drew Perkins (pictured center, alongside his team) told SiliconANGLE that billions of dollars of investment in data centers are going to waste because of a huge bottleneck in AI networks, which simply cannot cope with the massive volumes of data that need to be moved around. The situation is getting worse, he said, because new chip architectures and algorithmic innovations are increasing the demands for data, but existing networks simply cannot keep up. According to Perkins, existing networking companies have laid out roadmaps that only promise incremental enhancements in performance, because they're focused on improving existing architectures. But these are being pushed to their limits. "Networking technology has fallen so far behind that a completely new design is required," he said. "The plodding pace of subscale improvement promised by other existing and new solutions is simply inadequate to solve the problem." Perkins said that the bandwidth, latency, power consumption and radix (the number of input/output ports) of existing network switches are tightly coupled to the silicon architecture they're based on, which was designed for cloud data centers that are much smaller than today's emerging AI factories. "This silicon architecture has fundamentally been the same for the last two decades and is only incrementally improved with a doubling of capacity every two to 2.5 years," he said. "We believe that these incremental improvements leave a lot of performance on the table." Eridu's solution, Perkins explained, is a completely redesigned network switch architecture that promises to deliver an "order-of-magnitude" advance in performance and efficiency and enable previously impossible capabilities. He didn't reveal too much about the new switch because it has not yet launched, but said it's based on a "clean-sheet silicon architecture" that's designed to take full advantage of the most advanced silicon and packaging technologies. That allows a single high-radix Eridu switch to replace up to 30 lower-level radix switches, resulting in a much flatter network with lower latency and significantly lower power dissipation, with improved tokens-per-watt and tokens-per-dollar metrics. The switch reduces both latency and network "jitter" to enable data center operators to dramatically increase the scale of their graphics processing unit clusters, he said. He believes customers will ultimately be able to scale out their domains to millions of GPUs, while enjoying savings of up to 40% on their capital expenditures and benefit from faster deployment. The funding from today's round will help to accelerate the development of the switch and support the company's recruiting efforts as it looks to take the next step and bring it to market. Dylan Patel, an analyst with SemiAnalytics, said Eridu's switch is a promising development because there's an urgent need for redesigned network switches because the demands for bandwidth and scale are accelerating beyond what existing architectures can feasibly support. He was effusive in his praise for the startup's technology. "Eridu's networking technology is purpose-built for massive AI scale, supporting both scale-out and scale-up," he said. "It will enable more bandwidth, larger AI clusters and lower costs and deliver the next level of interconnect scale required to meet the insatiable demands of accelerated compute." Eridu doesn't have any official customers yet, but Perkins said the development of its silicon, systems and software has come far along, and the company is working closely with a number of "leading hyperscalers." He added that they have "completely validated" the company's product definition and have been deeply involved in helping to shape its design to fit the requirements of their data centers. "We cannot name them due to NDAs, but they are deeply engaged," he promised.

AI Networking Startup Eridu Steps Out Of Stealth With More Than $200M In Funding

Joining the AI networking fray is Eridu, a new upstart armed with an oversubscribed Series A funding round that's ready to take on network infrastructure constraints impeding AI adoption, the company said. A new AI networking company has surfaced from stealth mode with more than $200 million in funding in an effort it says to disrupt the $200 billion AI networking market. Eridu, based in Saratoga, California, and led by entrepreneur Drew Perkins, believes that networking is not keeping up with the demands coming from AI compute and scale that's rapidly increasing. The startup's mission is to meet current and future AI demands by "breaking infrastructure barriers holding it back," in the data center, the company revealed on Tuesday. Eridu's oversubscribed Series A round was led by Socratic Partners, John Doerr, Hudson River Trading, Capricorn Investment Group and Matter Venture Partners, with participation by SBVA, MediaTek, Bosch Ventures, TDK Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, and VentureTech Alliance, among others, the company said. [Related: The 10 Hottest Networking Startups Of 2025] Eridu has built what it calls a "clean-sheet" networking design, which includes a network switch that provides an "order-of-magnitude advance in performance, radix and efficiency needed to meet current and future AI demands," the company said. The design removes limits associated with current networking architectures, and as such, Eridu is promising fewer network tiers to reduce latency and network jitter, single-hop scale-up domains with thousands of GPUs, scale-out domains of millions of GPUs, up to 40 percent savings in CapEx for enterprises and upwards of 70 percent in networking power savings, as well as faster deployment of AI data centers, the company said. Eridu said that its Series A funding will be used to complete development of its offering. A spokesperson for the company told CRN that while its initial customers will be hyperscalers and business will direct as a result, once it expands to neocloud, service provider and large enterprise customers, the company plans to work through the channel. Eridu's CEO Perkins, a longtime entrepreneur in the tech space, most recently served as CEO of Mojo Vision, a company he founded that created what he called the first smart contact lens after his own bout with cataracts. Prior to that, he founded and led a handful of telecom companies, including Gainspeed, which was acquired by Nokia, and Infinera, which also later became part of Nokia. Prior to that, he founded and acted as CTO for Lightera Networks, which was later acquired by Ciena. "Billions of dollars of investment in AI data centers are being wasted because of the network wall," Perkins (pictured above) said in a statement on his company's funding announcement. "The plodding pace of improvement promised by the existing industry vendors is simply inadequate to solve the problem. Even new companies and solutions promising higher performance are in fact still subscale. Eridu has taken on and solved the key challenges across silicon, packaging, systems and optics needed to break through that wall."