Israeli startup Teramount, headquartered in Jerusalem, announced the completion of a $50 million funding round to support its global expansion and transition to large-scale industrial production. The round was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), the investment arm of the Koch conglomerate, and joined by several of the world’s leading technology players: AMD, Samsung Catalyst, Hitachi, Wistron, and existing investors such as Grove Ventures, founded by tech entrepreneur Dov Moran.

This is one of the most notable hardware rounds in Israel this year—not only in size, but especially in the caliber of the strategic partners involved, which represent the full value chain of the semiconductor and data center industries: chip manufacturers, hardware integrators, industrial firms, and tech giants.

The Vision: Seamlessly Connecting Fibers to Chips—Automatically and at Scale

Teramount was founded by Dr. Hisham Taha and Dr. Avi Israel with a mission to solve one of the most complex challenges of the data era: creating fast, reliable, and automated connections between optical fibers and silicon chips. The company is developing the TeraVerse platform, which enables precise, automated alignment between fibers and chips while maintaining full compatibility with existing semiconductor manufacturing processes.

In other words, Teramount does not manufacture photonic chips themselves. Instead, it offers a connectivity solution—a comprehensive platform that bridges the gap between fibers and chips using two key components: the PhotonicPlug and PhotonicBump. These are miniature optical connectors that allow fibers to be aligned and connected with high precision to photonic chips, all while being compatible with standard semiconductor fabs. The process is fully automated, eliminating the need for manual, microscope-guided alignment—a major bottleneck in the photonics industry today.

Put simply, Teramount has developed the “socket and plug” that finally makes it possible to integrate optical fibers into chips at industrial scale and low per-unit cost. Currently, fiber-to-chip alignment in silicon photonics is manual, expensive, slow, and fragile—severely limiting adoption.

According to the company, its solution can significantly reduce energy consumption in high-performance systems, increase bandwidth, cut latency, and simplify photonic integration—all while enabling full compatibility with traditional chip manufacturing workflows.

The New Backbone of AI Infrastructure

Teramount’s innovation is part of the rapidly growing field of silicon photonics—a technology that integrates optical communication elements with standard silicon chips. Instead of transmitting data via electrical current over copper wires, silicon photonics uses light carried through optical fibers, enabling much higher bandwidth, reduced energy use, and less heat.

This technology is becoming essential in the AI era: artificial intelligence systems consume massive amounts of data in real-time, and traditional electrical connections are increasingly a performance bottleneck.

The future—well understood by AMD, Samsung, and Hitachi—belongs to optical communication inside computing systems. Analysts project that the silicon photonics market will grow at a double-digit CAGR, reaching tens of billions of dollars within five years, with rapid adoption in data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), autonomous vehicles, 6G communication, and more.

According to Dr. Taha, “This funding round brings together top-tier players from across the entire ecosystem and represents an extraordinary vote of confidence in the platform we’ve built. The capital will support team growth, manufacturing scale-up, and global expansion.”