Eridu AI network startup launches publicly after raising $200M Series A

Drew Perkins has been building startups and inventing computer networking technology since the earliest days of the internet.

Now he is back as co-founder and CEO of AI networking startup Eridu, which is officially emerging from stealth on Tuesday with an oversubscribed $200 million Series A round. The financing was led by Socratic Partners, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, Matter Venture Partners, and others. The company said it has now raised a total of $230 million.

Perkins began his career in the 1980s and helped create the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, which became a crucial part of TCP/IP, the protocol stack that underpins the internet. In 1999, Lightera Networks, the optical switch company he co-founded, was sold to Ciena for more than $500 million. After that came Infinera, which later went public and was eventually sold to Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2025. He also co-founded Gainspeed, which was sold to Nokia, and, more recently, the augmented reality startup Mojo Vision.

But after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Perkins said he had an epiphany. In February 2023, he and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were both speaking at a small conference. During a conversation there, “Sam told me that what enabled AI and ChatGPT was just enormous amounts of compute. At which time, I think he meant 4,000 GPUs, but now we’re talking about millions of GPUs,” Perkins said.

From that discussion, I realised that the next major bottleneck for AI progress would not simply be getting access to more chips. It would also be how those chips communicate with each other across increasingly large systems.

“What we needed to do in the networking sector, in the networking industry, was come up with a brand-new way of thinking about how you build networks and build network equipment, network chips, and the entire thing.”

By late 2023, Perkins had met his co-founder Omar Hassen, whose background is in networking chip design for major industry players such as Broadcom and Marvell. In 2024, the two founded Eridu.

They started rethinking computer networking from the ground up, beginning with silicon itself, which means new chips designed for AI that include more networking functionality directly on the chip.

Eridu ultimately plans to sell complete systems that would serve the role in an AI data centre, as traditional networking gear providers like Arista Networks do in conventional data centres. Those systems are intended to replace many tiered optical connections by handling communications on-chip.

Today, when more networking capacity is needed, operators usually add more boxes, which increases the number of hops each unit of data may need to travel and adds latency. That contributes to the delay between typing a prompt and receiving a response.

Eridu is developing a switch that moves more of those functions directly onto the chip. “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.

“GPU compute, and memory bandwidth are improving by roughly 10x per year, while data centre switches from Broadcom, Marvell, Cisco, etc. are still only improving 2-3x every 2-3 years,” Perkins added.

The founders made several calls to venture capitalists Perkins had known over the year. They secured Wen Hsieh as a key investor. Hsieh is the founding managing partner of Matter Venture Partners and had previously helped lead Kleiner Perkins’ China investment group.

Hsieh then told Doerr about Eridu, and the well-known former Kleiner Perkins investor, who had backed one of Perkins’ earlier startups, also wanted to participate. That, Perkins said, sparked a rush of venture investor interest.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook,” Perkins said. “It’s been a fun time raising money for this venture … we’re very oversubscribed.”

Perkins declined to comment on the company’s valuation, beyond saying that it is in line with others that have raised this much in a Series A and that he believes it is neither too low nor too high. He said he wants the company’s roughly 100 current employees to do well on their stock options. He also would not say whether Eridu has already reached unicorn status, meaning a valuation above $1 billion.

If Eridu succeeds in delivering a new class of networking chip and system designed specifically for AI, it would place the company squarely in the middle of what is shaping up to be the biggest data centre buildout in history.

And unlike a vibe-coded product built by a college dropout in their twenties, Eridu’s founders bring something that has become increasingly unusual in Silicon Valley: deep experience. That could prove meaningful for the company’s future.

Other lead investors in the round included Hudson River Trading and Capricorn Investment Group, with participation from SBVA, MediaTek, Bosch Ventures, TDK Ventures, Eclipse, and VentureTech Alliance, an investment vehicle tied to chip manufacturing giant TSMC, among others.