Elevating Brand Awareness for Ayar Labs’ Transformational Optical/IO Technology
With four announcements in the first half of the year, Voxus creates a rolling thunder approach to propel a year of commercialization
Leveraging partners to build press momentum
Ayar Labs entered 2022 in an interesting position. It was the leading candidate for success in transitioning optical I/O – a critical milestone for the semiconductor and computing industries – from the lab to the marketplace. The company, which moves data from chip to chip using light instead of electricity transmitted through copper wires, would soon ship the first commercial units of its optical interconnect following a decade of research and development. To help raise overall brand and solution awareness, Ayar Labs wanted a PR program that would create a virtuous circle by externally demonstrating market success and partner traction.
Maximizing partner and funding news
Capitalizing on strategic partnerships with industry leaders including NVIDIA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, GlobalFoundries and Lumentum, Voxus developed a rolling thunder press campaign featuring four announcements in four months. The cornerstone of these news events was to generate buzz around a significant Series C raise in an increasingly challenging VC landscape.
Keep the hits coming
Voxus had less than a month to begin executing this campaign. The team’s strategy focused on securing media interviews and in-depth coverage for each announcement in key verticals such as semiconductor, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, optical/photonics and data center, as well as broader national coverage of the Series C raise.
Talk of the town
Ayar Labs had a total of 13 articles published in 2021, before Voxus took over the program. In less than six months, the “rolling thunder” campaign far exceeded this past coverage. During the first half of 2022, Voxus secured 313 total pieces of unique coverage and 19 media interviews. The initial strategic partnership announcement with HPE landed more than 50 pieces of coverage, including ZDNet, siliconANGLE, insideHPC, HPCwire, Optical Connections News and more. The joint announcements with GlobalFoundries and Lumentum resulted in another three dozen total pieces of coverage, including Laser Focus World, DigiTimes, Compound Semiconductor, Go Photonics and more. For the Series C announcement, Voxus secured an exclusive with Reuters that resulted in more than 150 pieces of unique coverage, including The Register, Light Reading, The Next Platform, SemiAnalysis, Semiconductor Digest and more. Lastly, the NVIDIA news resulted in over 50 pieces of coverage, including VentureBeat, EE Times, Gazettabyte, Optics & Photonics News, Lightwave, EnterpriseAI and more. The buzz generated in the first six months exceeded expectations and even lead to inbound media requests from Bloomberg, Business Insider and other prominent outlets.
Ayar Labs is disrupting the traditional performance, cost, and efficiency curves of the semiconductor and computing industries by driving a 1000x improvement in interconnect bandwidth density at 10x lower power. The company was founded in 2015 and is funded by a number of domestic and international venture capital firms as well as strategic investors.