PicoJool raises $27.5M for AI cluster interconnects

PicoJool raised $27.5 million in Series A funding led by Socratic Partners, bringing its total funding to $39.5 million as it commercializes VCSEL optical links for AI data centers. The company says its portfolio spans 200G products and aggregate connectivity from 800G to 3.2T, while SiliconANGLE reports that the immediate goal is replacing copper bottlenecks with lower-power optical links. Infrastructure teams should file this as a qualification signal, not a shipping guarantee: ask for watts per delivered workload and fallback optics, the same procurement discipline used in NVIDIA’s photonic-switch case.