Drew Perkins has been inventing computer networking technology and creating startups since the dawn of the Internet age.
Now he’s back as co-founder and CEO of an AI networking startup. Mridu that will officially come out of stealth 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. Eridu has now raised a total of $230 million, the company said.
Perkins began his career in the 1980s and helped 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 was Infinera, which went public and then sold to Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2025. He also co-founded Gainspeed (also sold to Nokia) and, more recently, the AR Mojo Vision Home.
But after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Perkins had an epiphany. In February 2023, Perkins and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke at a small conference. They got chatting, and “Sam told me that what AI and ChatGPT enabled were enormous amounts of computing. At the time, I think he was talking about 4,000 GPUs, but now we’re talking about millions of GPUs,” Perkins told TechCrunch.
From that conversation he realized that the obstacle to progress will not just be access to more chips; They will be the methods that the chips use to communicate with each other in their systems.
“What we needed to do in the networking sector, in the networking industry, was come up with a completely new way of thinking about how to build networks and network equipment, network chips and all that.”
In late 2023, Perkins met his co-founder, Omar Hassen, whose roots lie in designing networking chips for big industry players like Broadcom and Marvell. In 2024 they founded Eridu.
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They began to rethink computer networks from the ground up, starting with silicon, that is, new chips designed for AI that integrate more network functions.
Eridu will eventually sell complete systems that occupy the space in an AI data center that a classic network equipment provider, such as Arista Networks, occupies in a classic data center. These systems will replace many tiered optical connections with on-chip communications.
Nowadays, when more networks are needed, more frames are added, which increases the number of hops each bit of data may have to travel and increases latency, which contributes to that delay between writing a message and receiving a response.
Eridu is working on a switch that includes more functions on the chip itself. “So now I’m saving a lot of energy, I’m saving a lot of cost and then my network is a lot more reliable because the optics are the least reliable part of the network,” Perkins said.
“GPU compute and memory bandwidth is improving about 10x per year, while data center switches from Broadcom, Marvell, Cisco, etc. are still only improving 2-3x every 2-3 years,” Perkins added.
The founders made a few calls to venture capitalists Perkins knew over the years and landed Wen Hsieh as a key investor. Hsieh is the founding managing partner of Matter Venture Partners and previously helped lead Kleiner Perkins’ investment group in China.
Hsieh told Doerr about Eridu, after which the legendary former Kleiner Perkins investor (who had backed one of Perkins’ previous startups) also wanted in. That sparked a venture capital frenzy.
“My phone has been ringing off the hook,” Perkins said. “It’s been a fun time raising money for this company…we’re oversubscribed.”
Perkins declined to comment on the valuation, except to say that it is comparable to others raising this much in a Series A round and that he feels it is neither too low nor too high. He wants his roughly 100 current employees to do well with their stock options. He also declined to comment on whether the startup had achieved unicorn status (valued at more than $1 billion).
Needless to say, if Eridu can deliver on its promise to create a new type of AI-enabled chip and network system, it will be in the midst of building the largest data center in history.
And unlike a vibration-encoded product created by a twenty-something college dropout, Eridu’s founders have something increasingly rare in Silicon Valley these days: deep expertise. All this bodes well for the future of the company.
Other leaders 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 of chip factory giant TSMC), among others.
