AI networking startup Eridu emerges from stealth with a massive $200 million Series A

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 Muridu This will officially come out of the closet on Tuesday with an oversubscribed $200 million Series A round. The round was led by Socratic Partners, renowned VC John Doerr, Matter Venture Partners, and others. Ooredoo 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) that became a key part of TCP/IP, the protocol on which the Internet is based. In 1999, the optical switch company he co-founded, Lightera Networks, was sold to Ciena for more than $500 million. Next up was Infinera, which went public and was later sold to Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2025. He also co-founded Gainspeed (which was also sold to Nokia) and, more recently, Infinera. AR startup Mojo Vision.

But after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Perkins had an epiphany. In February 2023, Perkins and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were speaking at a small conference. They started chatting, “Sam told me that what enabled AI and ChatGPT was just massive amounts of compute. At the time, I think he meant 4,000 GPUs, but now we’re talking millions of GPUs,” Perkins told TechCrunch.

He realized from that conversation that the bottleneck to progress wouldn’t just be access to more chips; These will be the methods that chips use to communicate with each other across their systems.

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

By late 2023, Perkins met co-founder, Omar Hassan, who had his roots in designing network chips for big industry players like Broadcom and Marvell. In 2024, they founded the city of Eridu.

They are starting to rethink computer networking from scratch starting with silicon, which means new chips designed for AI that integrate more networking functions.

Eridu will eventually sell entire systems that take their place in an AI data center that a classic network equipment provider, like Arista Networks, takes in a classic data center. These systems will replace many level optical communications with on-chip communications.

Today, when more networks are needed, more boxes are added, which increases the number of hops each data bit may have to travel and increases latency—contributing to that delay between writing the prompt and getting a response.

Eridu is working on a switch that puts more functionality on the same chip. “So now I’m saving a lot of energy, saving a lot of cost, and then my network is more reliable because the optics are the least reliable part of the network,” Perkins said.

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

The founders made some calls to venture capitalists Perkins had known over the years, and hired Wayne Hsieh as a lead investor. Hsieh is the founding managing partner of Matter Venture Partners and previously helped lead Kleiner Perkins’ China investment group.

Hsieh told Doerr about Eridu, and then the legendary former Kleiner Perkins investor (who had backed one of Perkins’ previous startups) wanted to join, too. This unleashed a venture capital craze.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook,” Perkins said. “It’s been a fun time raising money for this project…We are way oversubscribed.”

Perkins would not comment on the valuation other than to say that it is similar to others who have raised this much in a Series A round and that he feels it is neither too low nor too high. He wants his current 100 or so employees to do well with their stock options. He also declined to comment on whether the startup has achieved unicorn status (which is valued at more than $1 billion).

Needless to say, if Eridu can deliver on its promise of creating a new type of AI-friendly chip and networking system, it will be in the middle of the largest data center build in history.

In contrast to a product designed by a twenty-something dropout, Eridoo’s founders have something increasingly rare in Silicon Valley these days: deep expertise. All of this bodes well for the company’s future.

Other leads 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 for chip giant TSMC), among others.