Kandou AI raises $225 million to bet that copper can outlast the optical revolution

Kandou AI, a Swiss semiconductor company that builds chip-to-chip interconnect technology, has raised $225 million in what it calls a Series A round, led by Maverick Silicon with strategic participation from SoftBank, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Alchip Technologies. The round values the company at $400 million. The label is worth pausing on: Kandou was founded in 2011 and previously raised more than $163 million across Series B and C rounds under the name Kandou Bus. The “Series A” designation reflects a rebrand and leadership change, not a fresh start.

The company’s new chief executive, Srujan Linga, a former Goldman Sachs managing director, took over in 2025 from founder Amin Shokrollahi, an EPFL professor of mathematics and computer science who invented the core technology. Shokrollahi’s contribution, a signalling method called Chord that sends correlated signals across multiple wires to increase bandwidth by a factor of two to four ...