AI networking startup Eridu emerges from stealth with a hefty $200 million Series A | TechCrunch

Drew Perkins has been inventing computer networking technology and building startups since the dawn of the Internet age.

Now he’s back as co-founder and CEO of an AI networking startup Mridu that officially comes out of stealth on Tuesday with an oversubscribed $200 million Series A round. The round was led by Socratic Partners, noted VC John Doerr, Matter Venture Partners and others. Eridu has now raised a total of $230 million, the company said.

Perkins began his career in the 1980s, helping to create the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) which became a key part of TCP/IP, the protocol the Internet relies on. In 1999, the optical switching company he co-founded, Lightera Networks, was sold to Ciena for more than $500 million. Next was Infinera, which went public and was later sold to Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2025. He also co-founded Gainspeed (also sold to Nokia) and, most recently, the AR startup Mojo Vision.

But after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Perkins had an epiphany. In February 2023, Perkins and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke at a small conference. They got to talking and “Sam told me that AI and ChatGPT were just enabling massive amounts of computing power. I think he meant 4,000 GPUs at the time, but now we’re talking millions of GPUs,” Perkins told TechCrunch.

From that conversation he realized that the bottleneck to progress won’t just be access to more chips; it will be the methods the chips use to communicate with each other through their systems.

“What we had to do in the networking sector, in the networking industry, was come up with a whole new way of thinking about how you build networks and build networking equipment, networking chips and things like that.”

By late 2023, Perkins had met his co-founder Omar Hassen, whose roots lie in designing networking chips for major industry players like Broadcom and Marvell. In 2024 they founded Eridu.

They started to reimagine computer networks from scratch, starting with the silicon, that is, new chips designed for AI that integrate more network functionality.

Eridu will eventually sell complete systems that take the place in an AI data center that a classic network equipment supplier, such as Arista Networks, occupies in a classic data center. These systems will replace many layered optical connections with on-chip communications.

Today, when more networks are needed, more boxes are added, increasing the number of hops each data bit must travel and increasing latency – adding to the delay between typing a prompt and getting a response.

Eridu is working on a switch that puts more functions on the chip itself. “So now I save a lot of power, I save a lot of costs, and then my network is much more reliable because the optics is the least reliable part of the network,” Perkins said.

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

The founders made a few calls to venture capital funds that Perkins has known over the years and brought in Wen Hsieh as a major investor. Hsieh is the founder and managing partner of Matter Venture Partners and previously helped lead Kleiner Perkins’ China investment group.

Hsieh told Doerr about Eridu, after which the legendary former Kleiner Perkins investor (who had backed one of Perkins’ previous startups) also wanted in on the action. That set off a VC frenzy.

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

Perkins wouldn’t comment on the valuation other than to say it’s comparable to others who have raised that much in a Series A round and that he believes it’s neither too low nor too high. He wants his hundred or so current employees to do well with their stock options. He also declined to comment on whether the startup had achieved unicorn status (valued at over $1 billion).

Needless to say, if Eridu can deliver on its promise to create a new kind of AI-friendly networking chip and system, it will be in the midst of the largest data center expansion in history.

And unlike a vibe-coded product built by a twenty-something college dropout, Eridu’s founders today have something that’s increasingly rare in Silicon Valley: deep experience. All this bodes well for the future of the company.

Other leaders in the round include Hudson River Trading and Capricorn Investment Group, with participation from SBVA, MediaTek, Bosch Ventures, TDK Ventures, Eclipse and VentureTech Alliance (an investment vehicle of chip giant TSMC).