Santa Clara, CA, USA and Lausanne, Switzerland — 23 March 2026 — Kandou AI, a leader in high-speed, energy-efficient connectivity and system solutions for the AI era, today announced the successful closing of its $225mm strategic funding round with backing from strong financial and strategic investors. The oversubscribed Series-A round was led by Maverick Silicon with strategic participation from SoftBank Group Corp., Synopsys, Inc., Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and Alchip Technologies Limited, signaling strong market conviction in Kandou AI’s mission to solve the critical data movement challenges in AI infrastructure. Several existing investors also participated in the financing round.

As artificial intelligence models grow exponentially, the industry faces a fundamental roadblock: GPUs and CPUs need to be connected to an exponentially growing memory footprints leading to memory and interconnect bandwidth becoming key bottlenecks. The performance of AI clusters is increasingly not constrained by compute, but by the speed and efficiency of data interconnects connecting compute infrastructure with memory. Traditional networking and interconnect technologies, designed for a pre-AI world, cannot keep pace. Kandou AI’s silicon proven, revolutionary interconnect technologies are purpose built to solve these key bottlenecks.

This new capital infusion will accelerate the company’s strategic priorities:

• Scaling Production: Manufacturing ramp-up of Kandou AI’s high-performance AI connectivity chips
• Expanding Customer Engagement: Deepening partnerships with leading hyperscale and AI infrastructure customers globally
• Advancing the Roadmap: Fueling the next generation of Kandou AI’s chip and IP portfolio to enable multi-terabit connectivity

“This funding round is a clear validation of our vision from our partners and customers. It accelerates our goal of transforming AI hardware through products built on our groundbreaking copper-based interconnect and system IP.” said Srujan Linga, Co-Founder and CEO of Kandou AI. “Our initial products will focus on AI systems and high-speed rack connectivity piercing the 448G barrier and beyond, with plans to expand into broader AI infrastructure over time. We are excited to partner with leading hyperscale and enterprise customers to bring these next-generation AI systems to market.”

Kandou AI’s unique advantage lies at the intersection of information theory and semiconductor design. Its patented signaling and SerDes technologies fundamentally reimagine how data moves across copper interconnects, delivering breakthrough improvements in bandwidth, reach, and energy efficiency. By unlocking dramatically higher performance from copper, Kandou AI enables build out of scalable AI systems at a fraction of the cost and power helping democratize AI infrastructure and the widespread adoption of AI across the world.

“The performance and scalability of next-gen AI clusters will be defined by the ability to move massive amounts of data between chips in an energy efficient way. This is where Kandou AI’s unique strength lies” said Manish Muthal, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Silicon, “we are proud to be supporting their vision of transforming AI system design to enable build out of scalable, energy-efficient AI systems of the future.”

“AI performance is increasingly limited by how efficiently data moves between compute and memory,” said Neeraj Paliwal, senior vice president of Silicon IP product management at Synopsys. “Kandou AI’s advanced coding techniques for high-speed copper interconnects complements the industry’s push to multi-terabit connectivity. By leveraging Synopsys’ pre-verified, high-quality IP, Kandou AI is speeding time to market for their next-generation solutions.”

“As hardware architectures evolve to meet increasingly data-intensive workloads, inter-chip data movement has emerged as a critical bottleneck to scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure,” said Nimish Modi, senior vice president and general manager, Strategy and New Ventures at Cadence. “We’re pleased to support Kandou AI as they leverage our EDA solutions to develop their next generation connectivity technologies to help address these scaling challenges.”

The funding announcement follows a period of significant execution for Kandou AI, including, successful tapeout of its next-generation SerDes technology, increased momentum in its existing retimer businesses, expansion of global engineering footprint with a new design center in Hyderabad, India and addition of key industry veterans to its executive team.