Ayar Labs' $5 Billion Number Is a Stock Sale, Not New Capital

Ayar Labs raised $150 million in new primary funding on Thursday, bringing the co-packaged-optics maker's 2026 primary capital to $650 million, according to a report from SiliconANGLE. Separately, a $225 million secondary transaction, in which existing shareholders sold stock among themselves rather than the company issuing new shares, priced Ayar Labs at more than $5 billion, according to Pomegra.

Those are two different events, and the distinction is the story. The $150 million is capital the company actually received, an extension of the $500 million Series E it closed in March at a $3.75 billion valuation, led by Neuberger Berman. The $5 billion figure, a roughly 33 percent markup on that March number, came from a secondary sale led by Antero Peak Group at Artisan Partners, with Sequoia Global Equities, ARK Invest and Greycroft also buying shares, Pomegra reported. No new money went to Ayar Labs in that transaction; it went to whichever employees and early investors sold.

Who did not buy in

Nvidia, AMD, MediaTek, Intel, Alchip and Wiwynn, the strategic chipmakers and systems vendors that back Ayar Labs and stand to use its technology, are not named among the buyers in the secondary sale, per Pomegra's reporting. The number setting the company's new valuation came from financial buyers, not from the customers whose adoption would make the valuation durable.

Ayar Labs makes co-packaged optics, hardware that replaces the copper wiring linking AI accelerators with fiber-optic connections built into the chip package itself, cutting the power and heat cost of moving data between GPUs. Chief Executive Mark Wade said "copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor for AI scale-up," according to SiliconANGLE, and the new capital funds a design center in Bengaluru, India, alongside continued work qualifying the product for volume production.

"Co-packaged optics is a foundational technology for the next generation of AI and cloud data centers," said William Lin, president and chief executive of Wiwynn, the Taiwan-based cloud infrastructure vendor that made a strategic investment in Ayar Labs earlier in 2026, according to SiliconANGLE. Sankara Venkateswaran, Ayar Labs' vice president of silicon engineering, said the Bengaluru center "supports our transition from technology development to commercialization and production," per the same report.

The number the company itself used

Ayar Labs' own framing of the March round is worth remembering now. Chief Executive Mark Wade told the company's own newsroom in March that investors should "think of this as our final round before we would be trying to position ourselves for a potential IPO." Six months later, the company has taken $150 million more in primary capital and let a secondary sale set a valuation 33 percent above the one it used for that IPO framing, without a public revenue number attached to either.

1. 202035 $ millions
2. March 2026 Series E500 $ millions
3. Sept. 2026 extension150 $ millions

Source: Pomegra and Ayar Labs, accessed 2026-09-11

Transaction	Date	Structure	Resulting valuation
Series E	March 2026	Primary, $500 million	$3.75 billion
Series E extension	Sept. 10, 2026	Primary, $150 million	Not restated
Secondary sale	Sept. 2026	Secondary, $225 million	More than $5 billion

Ayar Labs' all-time outside funding now exceeds $1 billion, which against a $5 billion secondary price is a multiple of roughly five times total capital raised since the company's 2020 seed-stage funding, a pace of markup similar to what Positron AI posted this month in its own tranched inference-hardware round. Neither Ayar Labs nor Pomegra's report specifies whether the September primary extension was priced at the March $3.75 billion mark or at something closer to the secondary's $5 billion. That gap, not the round itself, is what the company's next disclosure needs to close, particularly as rivals in inference infrastructure compete on the same power and bandwidth constraints Wade says copper can no longer handle.