Astera Labs, Inc. (ALAB) Business

Item 1. Business

Overview

Our mission is to innovate, design, and deliver semiconductor-based connectivity solutions that are purpose-built to unleash the full potential of cloud and AI infrastructure.

Building on years of experience with a singular focus on addressing connectivity challenges in data-centric systems, we have developed and deployed our leading Intelligent Connectivity Platform built from the ground up for cloud and AI infrastructure. Our Intelligent Connectivity Platform comprises of semiconductor-based, high-speed, mixed-signal connectivity products that integrate a matrix of microcontrollers and sensors, and COSMOS, our software suite, which is embedded in our connectivity products and integrated into our customers’ systems.

Our Intelligent Connectivity Platform provides our customers with the ability to deploy and operate high-performance cloud and AI infrastructure at scale, addressing an increasingly diverse set of requirements. We provide our connectivity products in various form factors including Integrated Circuits (“ICs”), boards, and modules. Our patented software-defined platform approach delivers critical connectivity performance, enables flexibility and customization, and supports observability and predictive analytics. This approach aims to efficiently address the data, network, and memory bottlenecks, scalability, and other unique infrastructure requirements of our hyperscaler and system OEM customers.

Based on trusted relationships with the leading hyperscalers and collaboration with data center infrastructure suppliers, our platform is designed to meet our customers’ unique cloud scale requirements. Our COSMOS software suite is foundational to our Intelligent Connectivity Platform and is designed to enable our customers to seamlessly configure, manage, monitor, optimize, troubleshoot, and customize functions in our IC, board, and module products.

Today, our connectivity solutions are at the heart of major AI platforms deployed worldwide featuring both commercially available Graphic Processing Units (“GPUs”) and proprietary AI accelerators. We offer our customers four product families across multiple form factors including ICs, boards, and modules, shipping millions of devices across leading hyperscalers. Our products, which include Aries PCIe®/CXL® Smart DSP Retimers, Aries PCIe®/CXL® Smart Cable Modules™, Taurus Ethernet Smart Cable Modules™, Leo CXL Memory Connectivity Controllers, and Scorpio Smart Fabric Switches are built upon industry standard connectivity protocols such as Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (“PCIe”), Ethernet, and Compute Express Link (“CXL”) to address the growing demand for purpose-built connectivity solutions that solve critical data, network, and memory bottlenecks inherent in cloud and AI infrastructure.

Industry Overview

Astera Labs is a global semiconductor company that provides hardware and software solutions for AI and cloud infrastructure applications to solve data, memory, and networking bottlenecks. We believe we are well-positioned to benefit from the AI and cloud infrastructures positive trends by addressing the industry’s next generation of connectivity challenges driven by increasing speed requirements and system complexity. Several of these trends and challenges include the rapid global adoption of cloud computing, which has led to increasing demand for compute-intensive AI workloads that are truly optimized only when deployed at cloud scale; increasing use of AI and increasingly larger and more complex AI workloads, and the need for purpose-built connectivity solutions that connect GPUs and other AI accelerators with each other directly or between servers to unleash AI accelerators’ full potential at cloud scale and solve critical data, network, and memory bottlenecks.

Our Products and Solutions

In recent years, we have successfully introduced four revenue-generating product families across multiple form factors including ICs, boards, and modules that are built upon our software-defined IC architecture. Additionally, we have developed a software suite that is embedded in our connectivity products and integrated into our customers’ systems.

Aries PCIe®/CXL® Smart DSP Retimers and Aries PCIe®/CXL® Smart Cable Modules™. Our Aries products, which include our COSMOS software suite, are essential to enable higher PCIe/CXL data bandwidth and lower latency interconnectivity between various heterogeneous compute processors, storage, and network controllers. Aries digitally recovers degraded high-speed signals and retransmits a clean copy of the data, thereby extending the reach of existing cost-effective interconnects, while enabling higher data bandwidth. Aries Smart Cable Modules are highly integrated systems consisting of the Aries PCIe Smart Retimer integrated circuit (IC) and peripheral components assembled on multiple form factors. The paddle card module is designed to be integrated into Active Electrical Cable (AEC) assemblies supporting a variety of applications, such as straight cables and breakout cables.

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Taurus Ethernet Smart Cable Modules™. Our Taurus products are hardware modules based on our Taurus ICs that increase network connectivity bandwidth between servers and switches over copper media. Taurus modules incorporate our COSMOS software suite and extend Ethernet signaling reach at higher data rates, providing cost-effective, rack-level network connectivity for cloud and AI infrastructure, removing rack-level Ethernet connectivity bottlenecks.

Leo CXL Memory Connectivity Controllers. Our Leo products allow our customers to overcome processor memory bandwidth bottlenecks and capacity limitations, while leveraging our COSMOS software suite’s built-in memory management and deep diagnostic capabilities. Leo ICs and boards enable expanding, sharing, and pooling of industry standard DRAM memory over high-speed serial links to support memory-intensive workloads running on AI accelerators and CPUs.

Scorpio Smart Fabric Switches. Our Scorpio products are purpose-built to enable our hyperscaler customers to deploy AI platforms at rapid pace and scale by improving energy efficiency, optimizing performance per watt, increasing AI accelerator utilization, reducing time to market, and maximizing uptime with our COSMOS software suite. Scorpio P-Series for PCIe Gen 6.0 connectivity is architected to support mixed traffic head-node connectivity across a diverse ecosystem of PCIe hosts and endpoints. Scorpio X-Series for GPU clustering is designed to deliver back-end GPU-to-GPU bandwidth with platform specific customization.

COSMOS Software Suite. Our COSMOS software suite is foundational to our Intelligent Connectivity Platform. COSMOS is designed to enable our hyperscaler customers to seamlessly configure, manage, monitor, optimize, troubleshoot, and customize functions in our IC, board, and module products. COSMOS has a software component that operates on our customers’ operating systems, and interfaces with other COSMOS software components running on microcontrollers integrated into our ICs, boards, and modules.

Our software suite provides three distinct capabilities to our customers that include Link Management, Fleet Management, and Reliability, Availability, Serviceability (“RAS”).

Ecosystem and Customers

Our customers include major hyperscalers, leading AI accelerator vendors (including GPU vendors), and system OEMs. We collaborate closely with our customers’ manufacturing and design partners, our ecosystem partners, and, importantly, directly with our customers. For instance, we have developed multiple reference and/or commercial designs with different processor vendors.

We engage with our customers and data center infrastructure suppliers through our Interop Lab, where industry participants work together to establish compatibility, and stress-test products early in their product development process and prior to large-scale deployments. These tests validate performance and interoperability between our connectivity products and other data center infrastructure suppliers’ products in real-world scenarios to minimize interoperation risk, reduce system development costs, lower unplanned downtime, and accelerate time-to-market. We enhance the value of our platform with our Interop Lab and by providing early interoperability reports with other data center infrastructure suppliers.

We sell our products directly to our customers and through distributors. Our distributors are primarily focused on fulfillment and logistical purposes, rather than selling, marketing, or providing technical support for our products. Our customers are closely involved in the design and often dictate the sourcing decisions for the systems that incorporate our products. They often engage third party contract manufacturers and design partners to manufacture their systems.

Our customers are defined as our end customers, our end customers’ manufacturing partners, and our distributors. When the context requires, we may use “end customers,” which are primarily hyperscalers and System OEMs, to distinguish from our end customers’ manufacturing partners and our distributors. When used in our audited consolidated financial statements included in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report, “customers” refers to parties we directly invoice for products or services, which primarily include our end customers’ manufacturing partners and our distributors.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales and marketing strategy is to maintain a deep understanding of our customers’ needs and to design products that are specifically tailored to each customer’s unique requirements. Our deep market knowledge, successful execution track record, and customer trust allow us to identify opportunities for new product design wins as well as for our product roadmap.

We focus our sales and marketing efforts on hyperscalers, leading AI accelerator vendors, and system OEMs. The universe of available end customers in our industry is small and concentrated, and as a result, it is very important to our success that we maintain strong and collaborative relationships with the end customers in our industry. For example, in

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2025, our top three end customers represented an aggregate of approximately 86% of our revenue. Our arrangements with our customers are typically effected via purchase orders for specific products. These purchase orders dictate the material terms of the arrangement, such as purchase price, purchase quantity, delivery date, and delivery destination.

We primarily sell our products to distributors and our end customers’ manufacturing partners, whom are primarily located in North America and Asia. Once sold, our products are typically incorporated into hyperscaler, leading AI accelerator vendor, and OEM systems. These systems are deployed in data center infrastructure around the world. Because of the global deployment of our products, we maintain a field applications engineering (“FAE”) team, which provides customers with on-site technical resources as required. Our FAE teams are located near customer research and development sites in North America and Asia, including Israel. Our field teams are internally supported by product applications engineers, marketing, and business development teams in North America and Asia, including Israel.

Manufacturing and Suppliers

We use third parties to manufacture our products, which include ICs, boards, and modules. The manufacturing process is subject to extensive testing and verification. We use a fabless manufacturing model and partner with TSMC to fabricate all of our ICs. We use Advanced Semiconductor Engineering and Amkor Technologies to assemble, package, and test our ICs. We also rely on a small, limited number of other manufacturing partners for our modules, boards, and IC substrates.

We are committed to supplying the highest quality devices to meet the most stringent demands of the world’s largest hyperscalers. As a result, our supply chain is optimized for quality and for rapid high-volume increases in production.

It is important that our products meet and exceed the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (“JEDEC”) specifications that define the methodology for reliability testing and qualification of electrical components. Our quality management includes high production test coverage and full product traceability. We have a dedicated quality team, which allows us to continuously monitor our customers’ feedback and improve our product quality by incorporating that feedback into our designs. Our partners and suppliers are committed to complying with Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (“REACH”), Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (“RoHS”), and industry standards. We are focused on sourcing components and materials that lessen our environmental footprint.

Research and Development

We believe our cloud-based approach to research and development is a valuable competitive strength. We use the cloud to both design new products and improve upon existing products. By harnessing the scale of cloud computing, we accelerate the speed of our research and development efforts, which in turn allows us to get to market faster and more efficiently. We partner with Electronic Design Automation (“EDA”) tool providers to run physical design and development flows in the cloud. With this approach, we can quickly simulate thousands of regressions in parallel with the most up to date and high-performance servers. This enables us to significantly increase our design verification iterations, leading to high quality tapeouts and an overall expedited development schedule.

Our research and development efforts focus on connectivity infrastructure for high-performance data center applications. We have committed, and intend to continue to commit, significant financial and other resources to technology and product innovation and development. We invest heavily in a global team of highly skilled engineers, with dedicated research and development offices in United States, Canada, Germany, India, Israel, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Intellectual Property

Our commercial success depends in part on our ability to obtain and maintain intellectual property protection for our brand, products and technology, defend and enforce our intellectual property rights, preserve the confidentiality of our trade secrets, operate our business without infringing, misappropriating, or otherwise violating the intellectual property or proprietary rights of third parties and prevent third parties from infringing, misappropriating, or otherwise violating our intellectual property rights. We rely on a combination of intellectual property rights, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and contractual protections, to protect our core technology.

As of December 31, 2025, we owned 26 issued patents and 35 pending patent applications in the United States, and one issued patent and five pending patent applications in foreign jurisdictions. Our issued patents and pending patent applications generally relate to interconnect and memory control technology, and printed circuit board and package designs. These issued patents, and any patents granted from our pending patent applications, are expected to expire between 2039 and 2044, without taking potential patent term extensions or adjustments into account. We routinely review our development efforts to assess the existence and patentability of new inventions.

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Moreover, we rely, in part, on trade secrets to protect aspects of our business that are not amenable to, or that we do not consider appropriate for, patent protection. However, trade secrets can be difficult to protect. While we take commercially reasonable steps to protect and maintain our trade secrets, including by entering into confidentiality agreements with our employees, consultants, and contractors and by maintaining physical security of our premises and physical and electronic security of our information technology systems, such measures may not prove to be adequate and there may not be any available remedies. In addition, our trade secrets may otherwise become known or be independently discovered by competitors or others.

We also protect our brand through common law trademark protections and trademark registrations. As of December 31, 2025, we owned trademark registrations for “ASTERA LABS” in the United States, European Union, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and Vietnam. We also have related foreign trademark applications that are pending.

Competition

We offer a differentiated and holistic Intelligent Connectivity Platform purpose-built for cloud and AI infrastructure workloads. Our competitors typically compete with us with respect to some, but not all, of our solutions. Our principal competitors include Broadcom, Inc., Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd., Marvell Technology, Inc., Microchip Technology Inc., Montage Technology, Parade Technologies, Ltd., and Rambus, Inc.

The principal competitive factors in our market include:

•Ability to provide a complete platform coupled with software and interoperability reports that ensure ease of integration and customer adoption;

•Product performance in terms of high data throughput, low latency connectivity, robust signal integrity to overcome extended channel insertion loss, and scalable memory expansion;

•Customization to support the specific requirements of each hyperscaler throughout the lifecycle of their infrastructure;

•Interoperability with major host processors and endpoint devices to ensure seamless system operation;

•Near-zero defect tolerance along with stringent qualification processes meeting industry standards and the specific customer requirements;

•Server-grade RAS;

•Sophisticated link telemetry features that enable signal monitoring at scale;

•Ease of making software updates to products to ensure regular software suite enhancements; and

•Ability to deliver products at large volumes in a timely manner to the quality standards required by our customers.

Human Capital

As of December 31, 2025, we had a total of 756 full-time employees globally, with 527 in North America, 208 in Asia, and 21 in Europe. We also supplement our workforce with additional contractors and consultants.

To our knowledge, none of our employees are represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good. Our human capital resource objectives include, as applicable, identifying, recruiting, retaining, incentivizing, and integrating our existing and new employees. The principal purposes of our equity incentive plans are to attract, retain, and reward personnel through the granting of stock-based compensation awards in order to increase stockholder value and the success of our company by motivating such individuals to perform to the best of their abilities and achieve our objectives.

Government Regulation

We are subject to the laws and regulations of various jurisdictions and governmental agencies affecting our operations and the sale of our products in areas including, but not limited to: intellectual property; tax; import and export requirements; anti-corruption; economic and trade sanctions; national security and foreign investment; foreign exchange controls and cash repatriation restrictions; data privacy and security requirements (such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (the “CCPA”) and the European Union General Data Protection Regulation with respect to the European Economic Area, and the United Kingdom (“UK”) General Data Protection Regulation, with respect to the UK, (collectively, the “GDPR”)); competition; advertising; employment; product regulations; environment, health and safety

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requirements; and consumer laws. To date, costs and accruals incurred to comply with these governmental regulations have not been material to our capital expenditures and results of operations. Although there is no assurance that existing or future governmental laws and regulations applicable to our operations and the sale of our products will not have a material adverse effect on our capital expenditures, results of operations, and competitive position, we do not currently anticipate material expenditures for government regulations. Nonetheless, we believe that significant changes in global trade regulations could potentially have a material impact on our business.

As a global company, the import and export of our products and technology are subject to laws and regulations including international treaties, U.S. export controls and sanctions laws, customs regulations, and local trade rules around the world. The scope, nature, and severity of such controls vary widely across different countries and may change frequently over time. Such laws, rules, and regulations may delay the introduction of some of our products or impact our competitiveness through restricting our ability to do business in certain places or with certain entities and individuals. For example, the U.S. Department of Commerce continues to add Chinese firms to the Entity List. These export restrictions, which would require that we obtain licenses from the U.S. Department of Commerce to allow us to export products to such listed firms, will likely limit or prevent us from doing business with certain potential customers or potential suppliers. These restrictive governmental actions and any similar measures that may be imposed on U.S. companies by other governments, especially in light of ongoing trade tensions between the United States and other countries, particularly China, could limit our ability to conduct business globally.

See the section titled “Risk Factors” for additional information regarding risks we face related to government regulation.

Available Information

Our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, and Current Reports on Form 8-K, including exhibits, and amendments to reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), are filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). We are subject to the informational requirements of the Exchange Act and file or furnish reports, proxy statements, and other information with the SEC. Such reports and other information filed by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at https://asteralabs.gcs-web.com/financials/sec-filings when such reports are available on the SEC's website. We use https://asteralabs.gcs-web.com/news-events/news-releases as means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.

The SEC maintains an Internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. The contents of the websites referred to above are not incorporated into this filing. Further, our references to the URLs for these websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.