From left to right: Astera Labs cofounders Sanjay Gajendra, Jitendra Mohan and Casey Morrison.
Astera Labs
Shares of the artificial intelligence-focused semiconductor networking firm have more than tripled over the past six months amid the ongoing AI arms race.
Over the past six months, shares of Astera Labs have soared by 250%, making two of the company’s cofounders the latest new billionaires of the AI infrastructure boom. Thanks to their stakes in the artificial intelligence-focused semiconductor networking firm, Forbes estimates that Astera Labs’ CEO Jitendra Mohan is worth $1.6 billion, while its COO Sanjay Gajendra is worth $1.7 billion.
With companies like OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and AMD announcing hundreds of billions of dollars of AI infrastructure deals in the last month alone, the need for networking technologies that eliminate bottlenecks and connect the GPUs and other components of these increasingly large and complex projects so that data flows as fast as possible has never been more clear. Astera Labs, which was early to recognize this opportunity, has positioned itself to exploit it.
“When they founded the company, the whole premise was to help facilitate the build out of AI infrastructure by focusing on connectivity technologies,” says Stifel analyst Tore Svanberg. “It’s not like this was a company [like Astera’s much larger main competitors Broadcom and Marvell Technologies] that used to sell into regular compute servers and then migrated their technology to go after AI servers. They literally started with a focus on AI infrastructure… And their execution has been pretty phenomenal ever since they went public [in March 2024], because they’ve been beating and raising their numbers handily every quarter.”
Back in 2022, Astera Labs’ CEO Mohan told Forbes, “I am trying to figure out how do we get to a billion dollars in revenue. That is the opportunity in front of us.” Three years later, the company is on the verge of achieving that milestone. Its sales have soared more than elevenfold from $35 million in 2021 to $396 million in 2024. Analysts expect the company to become profitable for the first time in 2025 and to hit the $1 billion revenue mark in 2026, according to Yahoo Finance.
Before founding Astera Labs, Mohan, 52, and Gajendra, 51, worked together at semiconductor firms Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor Corporation for nearly a decade. It was at Texas Instruments that they met Astera Labs’ third cofounder and chief product officer, Casey Morrison. The trio decided to start their own company in 2017 after realizing that connectivity wasn’t keeping up with advances in AI and machine learning.
“That was the aha moment for us,” Gajendra told Forbes in 2022. “This AI and machine learning train is heading really fast.”
In 2021, Astera Labs raised $50 million from investors including Fidelity, Intel and VC firm Sutter Hill Ventures in a deal that valued the company at $950 million. A year later, those same three investors and a slew of others poured another $150 million into Astera Labs at a $3.2 billion valuation. Then in March 2024, Astera Labs raised $820 million in an IPO that put the firm’s market capitalization at around $6 billion.
Today, public markets have pushed Astera Labs’ market cap up to $34 billion, and Mohan and Gajendra each own an estimated 4% stake worth $1.5 billion. And that’s after taking into account the more than $200 million of stock each of them has sold (before taxes) since the IPO. Morrison’s stake in the company, meanwhile, has never been disclosed.