Swedish semiconductor company Kandou AI has raised $225 million in a Series A round, led by Maverick Silicon, with strategic participation from SoftBank, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Alchip Technologies. The company, which builds chip-to-chip interconnect technology, was founded in 2011 and previously raised over $163 million under the name Kandou Bus. The CEO, Srujan Linga, took over in 2025 from founder Amin Shokrollahi, who invented the core technology, Shokrollingahi. The $225m raise is the largest in Kandou's history and brings SoftBank one of the most aggressive AI infrastructure investors, SoftBank. Kandou is also exploring the possibility of integrating its Chord signalling technology into chip design flows that chip architects use to build processors and memory controllers. The optical interconnect market for AI data centres is projected to grow from $3.75 billion in 2025 to $18.36 billion by 2033. If successful, Kandou’s technology could be integrated into chips designed by other companies rather than requiring customers to adopt it.