Israeli fiber-to-chip company Teramount today announced the completion of a $50 million financing round led by new investor Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT). Existing investors Grove Ventures and new strategic investors, including AMD Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Samsung Catalyst Fund and Wistron, also participated the round. Jerusalem-based Teramount has developed scalable fiber-to-chip interconnect solutions for AI, data centers and advanced computing,
To meet escalating performance and power demands, the industry must adopt advanced optical interconnects to pass data between compute and networking components. Teramount makes this possible with its TeraVerse solution: a detachable, serviceable connector that links optical fibers coming from outside the rack to the silicon photonics chips inside Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) systems.
Teramount was founded by CEO Hesham Taha and CTO Avi Israel. Taha is an unusual figure on the Israeli tech scene. He did not grow up in a privileged suburb in Greater Tel Aviv or serve in the elite IDF 8200 intelligence unit. He grew up in the Arab town of Bu'eine Nujeidat in the foothills of Mount Turan in the Galilee - the fifth of eight children. His father is a building worker and his mother a housewife.
He recalls, "I didn't connect with many subjects at school, but I felt a special connection to physics. Although he graduated with a high school diploma in physics, he went to work like many in the village in construction, most of it in the Sharon region - hard work that involved long trips in each direction. "In the early 1990s, there was an impressive construction boom in Israel - I made a lot of money there, and I asked myself: Why not actually continue? But physics attracted me."
Although he is from the north, he did not enroll in the Technion in Haifa but in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem due to the attraction to applied physics and the institute's specialization in combining physics and mathematics. The studies were difficult and challenging for him, mainly due to the language barrier and the need to express himself in Hebrew at a high level.
"I was the first of my brothers to go to study at university," he says, "But after that, I encouraged my three younger brothers to enroll and some of them have already completed their master's and doctoral degrees."
Taha continued his studies in applied physics until his doctorate but had difficulty finding work outside academia. "I looked in many places, but I always felt that there was a language and cultural barrier, of people not like me and it was always there in the background. They don't say that, you just get a laconic negative answer: "We're sorry." He finally found himself at a company that was spun off from his research group at the university, Nanox in Jerusalem, where he worked alongside his future partner in founding Teramount, Dr. Avi Israel, whom he has known since his undergraduate days
Teramount, which is located in Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem, currently employs 40 people, at least eight of whom are from Arab society, some from neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. "There's a different landscape here than the natural landscape of Israeli high-tech," says Taha. "People who come here for job interviews from the east of the city get a different feeling that they don't get at other companies, of someone who is close to them and knows how to speak their language. The mere fact that the company has founders from both nations creates a place that may not solve the problems of the Middle East, but brings together people from different backgrounds to solve a problem in the field of data, heat dissipation, and light transmission."
KDT Israel managing director Isaac Sigron says, "Optical interconnects are critical components of the future of AI infrastructure, and Teramount is poised to be a leading supplier of these solutions. We are very impressed with the position Teramount has established in the market and its partnerships with key industry players."
The funding will enable Teramount to expand its team and increase production, ahead of the market adoption of CPO (co-packaged optics).
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 29, 2025.
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