AI networking startup Eridu emerges from stealth with $200M

On Tuesday, Eridu officially emerged from stealth with an oversubscribed $200 million Series A round, bringing its total raised funding to $230 million. The early-stage funding round attracted a broad group of institutional and strategic backers.

The investors in the round include:

• Lead investors: Socratic Partners, John Doerr, and Matter Venture Partners (a firm with investment experience in China)
• Other investors: Hudson River Trading, Capricorn Investment Group, SBVA, MediaTek, Bosch Ventures, TDK Ventures, Eclipse, and VentureTech Alliance (an investing vehicle of chip fab giant TSMC)

The startup is addressing a critical bottleneck in artificial intelligence infrastructure. Drew Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Eridu, pointed out that GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) compute and memory bandwidth are improving by roughly 10x per year. Meanwhile, data center—a facility housing computer systems—switches from providers like Broadcom, Marvell, and Cisco are still only improving 2-3x every 2-3 years. This divergence means traditional networking methods, which rely on tiered optical connections, are becoming the primary constraint on AI performance. Perkins recalled a February 2023 conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who noted that ChatGPT was enabled by enormous amounts of compute. While Altman then meant 4,000 GPUs, Perkins noted that the industry now requires millions of GPUs, making efficient communication between these chips essential.

To resolve this, Eridu plans to eventually sell complete systems for AI data centers, taking the place of traditional network gear providers like Arista Networks. Instead of adding more physical boxes that increase latency—the transmission delay of data—Eridu is developing silicon-based systems that integrate networking functionality directly onto the chip. This approach will replace tiered optical connections with on-chip communications. By moving these functions onto the silicon, the company aims to reduce power consumption and costs while improving reliability. “So now I’m saving a ton of power, I’m saving a ton of cost, and then my network is much more reliable because the optics are the least reliable part of the network,” Perkins said.

Unlike many younger startups in Silicon Valley, Eridu relies on founders with decades of industry experience. Perkins began his career in the 1980s and has co-founded several networking companies. His previous ventures include Lightera Networks, an optical switch—networking hardware—company he co-founded that sold in 1999 for over $500 million; Infinera, which sold to Nokia in 2025 for $2.3 billion; Gainspeed; and Mojo Vision. He co-founded Eridu in 2024 alongside Omar Hassen, who has a background in networking chip design at industry players like Broadcom and Marvell. The company, which currently has 100 or so employees, is leveraging this deep technical expertise to redesign networking from the silicon up.

Why it matters

Eridu aims to create a new kind of AI-friendly networking chip and system, positioning itself in the middle of the largest data center build-out in history.