Veteran Network Pioneer Returns, Secures $200M to Rethink AI's Backbone

Drew Perkins, a name etched into the internet's foundation, is launching his next venture. His new company, Eridu, announced today it has raised $200 million in a Series A financing round. The oversubscribed investment was led by Socratic Partners and includes notable backers like John Doerr and Matter Venture Partners, bringing Eridu's total funding to $230 million.

Perkins' career spans decades, from co-creating fundamental internet protocols in the 1980s to founding optical networking companies like Lightera and Infinera, the latter sold to Nokia last year. His latest project was born from a 2023 conversation with OpenAI's Sam Altman. Altman noted that AI's explosive growth was fueled by massive computing power, now requiring millions of GPUs. Perkins recognized a looming problem: the network connecting these chips couldn't keep pace.

"GPU performance advances roughly tenfold each year," Perkins explained. "But the data center switches connecting them improve only two or three times every few years. That gap is becoming a wall."

In 2024, Perkins partnered with chip design veteran Omar Hassen to found Eridu. They are designing a new class of networking hardware from the silicon up, integrating communication functions directly onto chips built for AI. This approach aims to replace complex, multi-tiered data center networks with more efficient, on-chip systems, reducing latency, power consumption, and cost.

The funding round coalesced quickly after Matter Venture Partners' Wen Hsieh learned of the plan and brought it to John Doerr, a previous backer of Perkins' work. "My phone has been ringing off the hook," Perkins said, describing a competitive investment process. He declined to specify the company's valuation but emphasized it was structured to reward Eridu's approximately 100 employees.

Additional investors include Hudson River Trading, Capricorn Investment Group, and corporate venture arms from TSMC, MediaTek, and Bosch. With its experienced founders and a clear target on a critical bottleneck, Eridu is positioning itself at the center of the global data center expansion driven by artificial intelligence.

Source: TechCrunch