CHESTERBROOK, PA — Cornelis Networks raised approximately $205 million in a Series C financing led by IAG Capital Partners, giving the Tredyffrin Township technology company fresh capital to expand production, develop AI networking products and pursue a growing market for infrastructure connecting processors inside data centers.
The financing is the Philadelphia region’s largest reported venture-capital round of 2026, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. Cornelis did not disclose its valuation.
The Intel spinout has expanded from about 40 employees in 2020 to more than 250 and plans to use the capital to develop its next generation of scale-up and scale-out networking products, support CN6000 manufacturing and customer deployments, deepen customer relationships and accelerate commercialization.
Cornelis is simultaneously expanding into scale-up networking with Active Compute Fabric, an architecture designed to move some computing functions into the network connecting AI accelerators.
The approach combines lossless data transport, in-fabric acceleration and programmable computing across scale-up and scale-out networks. Cornelis argues that allowing the network to process data and offload collective operations can reduce the time costly accelerators spend waiting for information.
“AI infrastructure is reaching a point where faster endpoints alone are not enough. The fabric has to become an active part of the compute system,” Chief Executive Officer Lisa Spelman stated.
Active Compute Fabric uses open standards including UALink and ESUN for scale-up networking and Ultra Ethernet specifications for scale-out infrastructure. Cornelis is positioning that standards-based architecture as an alternative for customers seeking to combine different accelerators and infrastructure components.
The company also disclosed a collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies involving validation toward future rack-scale AI data-center designs.
“As AI systems continue to scale, moving data efficiently across the rack becomes just as important as the compute itself,” Tony Pialis, executive vice president and general manager of Data Center at Qualcomm Technologies, stated. He pointed to tighter integration among computing, memory and networking as a way to improve accelerator utilization and AI economics.
Cornelis estimates the addressable market for open-standard scale-up and scale-out AI networking could exceed $55 billion by 2030. That estimate was cited by IAG Capital Partners as part of its rationale for the investment.
“Open-standard scale-up and scale-out networking for AI represents more than $55 billion of opportunity by 2030, and we believe the network will decide how much of the total AI build-out delivers real return,” IAG Capital Partners partner Joel Whitley stated.
Cornelis is already shipping its CN5000 networking product. Its CN6000 is being sampled by customers, with expanded availability expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.
The company also estimates that communication and synchronization delays can create substantial unused computing capacity in large AI systems. Its modeling of a hypothetical 100,000-GPU installation estimates roughly half of GPU hours could be spent waiting for data, representing about $1.68 billion annually in unused capacity and 500 gigawatt-hours of electricity.
Those figures are company projections rather than measured performance from a deployed Active Compute Fabric system. Cornelis based the calculation on pre-production simulation and modeling, published industry utilization data, an assumed $4 per GPU-hour, and 8,400 operating hours annually.
Cornelis is headquartered at 1500 Liberty Ridge Drive in the Chesterbrook area of Tredyffrin Township, with a Wayne postal address. The financing gives the company additional resources to scale its operations as it moves beyond its established high-performance computing business and deeper into networking for AI data centers.
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