With neoclouds rerating down, the revenue multiples for some of these inference businesses seem really silly

Just one man’s opinion

Excited to announce Volantis's $88M Series A. We are solving Al's memory bottleneck by using optics, enabling chips with huge amounts of fast & cheap memory. By boosting both the memory bandwidth and capacity per chip by orders of magnitude, we enable ultra-fast inference (up to 10,000 tps/user) for large models (>10T) - with low $/tok to boot. Initially, this will enable insanely fast agents - think coding agents that finish in minutes or even seconds instead of hours. More excitingly, optics is a fundamentally scalable way to increase memory systems. Not 2X/year, but by orders of magnitude across new generations. This will enable a structurally new Al industry, including restarting scaling laws, holding entire repos in context windows & more. Our team has pioneered many core semiconductor technologies: the 1st CoWoS product, early HBM, the 1st silicon photonics CPO systems, the 1st high volume tunable VCSELs, the 1st processors to directly communicate using light & more. We’ve already sent data >10× farther than equally tiny electrical wires inside a chip package. Our next iteration is already taped out and targets world-record bandwidth density over relevant distances, read more: volantissemi.ai/news-insight…

We’ve raised $80 million in Series A funding, co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, with continued participation from Conviction, Abstract, A*, and Grant Gordon. This brings our total raised to over $100 million. We started Watney by asking a simple question -- what can a robot enable in industries where the work remains valuable on an infinite horizon? We found an answer in the fundamental inputs to civilization: energy, matter, and intelligence. A robot will never be as charming as a barista or as personable as a housekeeper, but it can be more exacting than a surgeon. And, a breakthrough in one quickly becomes the capability of millions. We don’t imitate human motions or processes. We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock. We work on problems where our choice of embodiment gives us an order of magnitude advantage, whether through precision, reliability, or scale. Compute is just beginning to transform society, but it’s constrained by execution. Since 2025, Watney has been serving the largest hyperscalers in the world, helping accelerate their compute rollout through an end-to-end deployment model. Across hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities, our systems have achieved more than four nines of reliability. They’ve enabled our customers to build data centers faster, at larger scales, and with more ambitious architectures. Today, we operate the largest fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365 across the United States. This is all to say, it's an exciting time at Watney. We’re all here because we want to see more ambition in the physical world. We are hiring across all domains. Join us.