Drew Perkins, a co-founder and CEO of AI networking startup Eridu, has emerged from stealth with a $200 million Series A round led by Socratic Partners, John Doerr, Matter Venture Partners, and others. The company has raised a total of $230 million. Perkins had an epiphany when he learned that the bottleneck for progress was the use of AI chips to communicate with each other across their systems. He and his co-founders, Omar Hassen, and Wen Hsieh, are developing new chips designed for AI that integrate more networking functionality. They plan to sell complete systems that replace many tiered optical connections with on-chip communications. The startup will also be the largest data center-out-out in the history, unlike a typical college-coded product built-out by 20 college students.