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 Capital, and VentureTech Alliance, among others, the company said.

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.”