AI networking startup Eridu is going private with a $200M Series A round

Drew Perkins has been pioneering computer technology and startups since the Internet age.

Now he’s back as co-founder and CEO of an online AI startup Mridu it’s going private on Tuesday with a $200 million Series A round. The round was led by Socratic Partners, prominent VC John Doerr, Matter Venture Partners, and others. Eridu has now raised $230 million, the company said.

Perkins began his career in the 1980s, and helped develop the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) which became a major component of TCP/IP, the protocol upon which the Internet relies. In 1999, the optical switch company he co-founded, Lightera Networks, was sold to Ciena for over $500 million. Next was Infinera, which IPO’d and was later sold to Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2025. He also founded Gainspeed (also sold to Nokia) and, more recently, AR launch Mojo Vision.

But when OpenAI released ChatGPT, Perkins had an epiphany. In February 2023, Perkins and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke at a small conference. They started chatting, and “Sam told me that what helped AI and ChatGPT was just a few. At this point, I think he meant 4,000 GPUs, but now we’re talking about millions of GPUs,” Perkins told TechCrunch.

He realized from the conversation that the bottle forward will not get more chips; they will be the means that our chips use to communicate with each other in their systems.

“What we had to do in the networking industry, in the networking industry, was come up with a new way of thinking about how you design networks and design network equipment, network chips, and everything.”

By the end of 2023, Perkins had met his co-founder, Omar Hassen, whose roots lie in the development of network equipment for major players such as Broadcom and Marvell. In 2024, he founded Eridu.

They also began to rethink computer networks from the ground up with silicon, meaning new AI-engineered chips that incorporate more functionality.

Eridu will eventually sell complete systems that take the place in the AI ​​data center that a leading IT infrastructure provider, such as Arista Networks, takes in the top data center. These systems will replace many tiered optical interfaces with on-chip communications.

Today, the more networks are needed, the more boxes are added, which increases the number of hops for each data to travel and increases latency – which increases the delay between a quick write and receiving a response.

Eridu is working on a switch that puts more functions on the chip itself. “So now I’m saving a lot of energy, and I’m saving a lot of money, so my network is more reliable because the optics are the most reliable part of the network,” Perkins said.

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

The founders made several calls to VCs that Perkins had known for years and found Wen Hsieh as the lead investor. Hsieh is the co-founder of Matter Venture Partners and previously helped lead Kleiner Perkins’ China investment team.

Hsieh told Doerr about Eridu, after which the well-known former Kleiner Perkins businessman (who helped start Perkins) also wanted in. This created a VC frenzy.

“My phone has been ringing,” Perkins said. “It’s been an exciting time to raise money for this business…we’ve had a lot of subscriptions.”

Perkins would not comment on the valuation other than to say it is comparable to other raises around Series A and he feels it is neither too low, nor too high. He wants his 100 or so employees to be successful in their decisions. He also declined to comment on whether the startup had found a unicorn (worth more than $1 billion).

Undoubtedly, if Eridu can fulfill its promise of creating a new type of AI-friendly network Chip and system, it will be among the largest data center construction in history.

And, unlike a vibe-coded product built by 20 college dropouts, Eridu’s founders have something rare in Silicon Valley these days: deep knowledge. All this indicates the future of the company.

Some of the leaders in the round include Hudson River Trading and Capricorn Investment Group, the participants of which are SBVA, MediaTek, Bosch Ventures, TDK Ventures, Eclipse and VentureTech Alliance (an investment vehicle for chip fab giant TSMC), among others.