Computing News
Astera Labs CEO: ‘We Could Be The Broadcom’ Of CXL Solutions
Shane Snider
The California-based chip connectivity firm has seen growth every quarter after investing in emerging semiconductor technology.
Astera Labs’ rising star has not dimmed even as a softening global economy casts a shadow over the tech industry. And CEO Jitendra Mohan told CRN that the Santa Clara, Calif. startup’s chip connectivity focus will continue to sharpen along with its channel partnership vision.
The young company recently said its valuation had reached more than $3 billion after a successful $150 million fundraising round led by Fidelity Management & Research. Founded in 2017, Mohan attributes the company’s meteoric growth to its early investment in the cloud and emerging connectivity tech. Its signature product, the Leo Memory Connectivity Platform, enables servers to create a unified coherent memory space between CPUs, and accelerators.
“We find ourselves in a very interesting market and we believe the market we’re addressing will continue to grow to $10 billion in TAM (total addressable market),” he said in an interview. “And it’s split across CXL (Compute Express Link), across ethernet, across PCIe Retimer class of products… we find ourselves in the position that we could be the Broadcom of this. So that’s really what we’re focused on – bringing newer and newer products to the market, addressing our customers needs and talking to customers who can really drive growth.”
Astera was an early tester of CXL along with Intel Corp. CXL works with the current PCIe Gen 5 as a new open interconnect standard that targets intensive CPU workloads. And it’s quickly becoming a new standard for advanced computing needs, especially in cloud applications by easing bandwidth bottlenecks and increasing capacity. “When we were first working with CXL, it didn’t even have a name yet,” Mohan said. “The scale of CXL became even larger than we anticipated.”
What makes Astera’s story so compelling is that the company’s prospects keep soaring even as all chip firms have suffered declining sales in 2022. Mohan attributes the company’s good fortune to tying itself to the right niche.
Mohan declined to disclose revenue figures for the private company but said Astera had experienced growth every quarter since its inception. “We’ve done fairly well and we’ve established a leadership position in the market because of the technology that we have and the innovation we have – but also the execution. Our team has been just stellar in delivering on the milestones our customers set for us.”
Here’s more of what Mohan had to say in an interview with CRN:
