Salience Labs, which develops photonic chips designed to enhance connectivity within AI data centres, has announced a $125 million Series B funding round that was oversubscribed. The capital injection will fund the rollout of its optical switching technology and support the expansion of manufacturing capacity.
Bullhound Capital led the round, joined by AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank. Earlier backers including Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures also committed fresh capital. Callum Stewart, a Principal at Bullhound Capital, will take a seat on Salience Labs' board following the investment.
The company's core technology centres on optical circuit switching (OCS), an approach designed to strengthen connections between GPUs distributed across AI data centre infrastructure. Its fully integrated, all-optical switching design can link thousands of GPUs spanning multiple racks, tackling the rising pressures on network throughput, operational efficiency and power draw as AI computing infrastructure grows.
Salience Labs has built its solution on more than a decade of research into silicon photonics. The company's integrated chip design targets high-volume manufacturing and broad deployment across AI data centre systems.
OCS will play a critical role in AI datacenter networking. As customers roll out optical links in their datacenters, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that workloads demand. Salience Labs has demonstrated a market-leading technology: a fully integrated on-chip solution that scales well to high-volume manufacturing.
Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs
The company recently showcased a 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, which it describes as a first-of-its-kind achievement in silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching. Development is underway on 128-port and 256-port variants to support larger deployments and additional use cases in data-heavy environments.
To advance manufacturing at scale, Salience Labs is partnering with Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor. The company intends to establish a second location on the West Coast and move into new geographic regions.
The fresh funding will go towards deploying its optical switching technology, ramping up high-volume manufacturing, and advancing product development on next-generation optical switches. Salience Labs also plans to strengthen its engineering workforce to support these expansion efforts.
Source: Tech.eu
