Astera Labs' founders bet in 2017 that AI would hit a wall, and that the wall would be wiring. Processors were getting faster, but moving data between them, their memory, and the network was falling behind. Astera built chips to fix that, starting with Aries retimers that clean up PCIe signals inside servers. When it went public in March 2024, every major cloud company was racing to build AI data centers.

Betting on the Bottleneck

Jitendra Mohan, Sanjay Gajendra, and Casey Morrison founded Astera Labs in 2017. They believed AI models would grow so large that they would only run at cloud scale. The limit, they argued, would be connectivity. Their Aries retimers became the main product, joined by Taurus Ethernet cable modules and Leo memory controllers. Astera worked with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, and it sold to the hyperscalers. Revenue grew 45 percent in 2023 on higher Aries shipments.

Thirty-Six Dollars and AI Demand

Astera Labs priced its IPO at $36 a share in March 2024 and listed on Nasdaq as ALAB. Its revenue for 2023 was $115.8 million. By then its products had shipped in millions of devices across all the major hyperscalers, all managed by its COSMOS software. Mohan remained CEO and Gajendra president. Astera Labs still trades on Nasdaq.

Cover: Ad Astra, Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for Ad Astra, to the stars (Astera).