Salience Labs, a developer of photonic chips for AI data centre connectivity, has raised $125 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round to accelerate the deployment of its optical switching technology and expand its manufacturing operations.
The round was led by Bullhound Capital, with participation from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank. Existing investors Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures also participated. As part of the investment, Callum Stewart, Principal at Bullhound Capital, will join Salience Labs' Board of Directors.
Salience Labs develops optical circuit switching (OCS) technology designed to improve connectivity between GPUs in AI data centres. Its fully integrated, all-optical switching architecture is designed to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks, addressing growing demands on network performance, efficiency and power consumption as AI computing infrastructure expands.
Built on more than a decade of research in silicon photonics, the company's integrated chip architecture is designed for high-volume manufacturing and deployment across AI data centre infrastructure.
Explaining the importance of optical switching for AI data centres, Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs, said:
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.
The funding follows Salience Labs' demonstration of its 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, which the company describes as an industry first for silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching. Salience Labs is also developing 128-port and 256-port switches to support larger networks and additional applications in data-intensive environments.
Salience Labs is working with organisations including Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor to scale its manufacturing operations. The company also plans to expand its presence in Silicon Valley with a second West Coast location and enter additional geographic markets.
The funding will support the deployment of Salience Labs' optical switching technology, the expansion of high-volume manufacturing and further product development, including its next-generation optical switches. The company also plans to grow its engineering team to support these activities.