Scintil Photonics secures investment boost
Scintil Photonics, a supplier of advanced silicon photonic integrated circuits with monolithically integrated lasers and optical amplifiers, has announced it has secured additional investment that completes its second round of funding, by welcoming Applied Ventures ITIC Innovation Fund, L.P., a fund jointly created by Applied Ventures, LLC and ITIC-Taiwan (Industrial Technology Investment Corporation). Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC) led the original round in June 2022, with support from historic investors Innovacom, Supernova Invest and Bpifrance through its Digital Venture fund. With this new investment, the company’s total funding has reached €19M ($19M).
Scintil Photonics’ IC solutions aim to significantly enhance traditional high-speed optical communications from rack-to-rack to chip interconnections. The company’s III-V Augmented Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit (ASPIC) is a single-chip solution consisting of advanced silicon photonic circuits made from standard silicon photonics processes available at CMOS commercial foundries. The solution features III-V optical amplifiers and lasers integrated on the backside of advanced silicon photonic circuits. This unique all-in-one integration enables ultra-high-speed communications, due to high parallelization and higher bit rates, for example from 800 Gbit to 3,200 Gbit/sec., thereby helping the multi-billion-dollar electronics industry overcome the slowing of Moore’s Law with the integration of very high-speed optical communications.
The company will use the additional funds to improve its global industrialization footprint and speed up the commercialization of its products in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.
“Scintil Photonics is very happy to welcome Applied Ventures and ITIC. By teaming with such strong semiconductor industry players we can access the very robust industrial ecosystem in the Americas and Asia-Pacific. Their support will also bring great opportunities to deploy products to customers in those regions,” said Sylvie Menezo, president and CEO of Scintil Photonics.
“We believe that silicon photonics-based optical chips with integrated lasers represent a major new opportunity in the data center, High Performance Computing (HPC), cloud systems and telecom markets. Scintil is a great example of our strategy to invest in the Materials to Systems™ stack. We are excited to be working with its team in advancing the technology with key market leaders in the HPC space,” said Anand Kamannavar, vice president and global head of Applied Ventures.
“We are delighted to be part of this round of investment in Scintil Photonics as it presents a huge opportunity for next phase integration of very high-performance systems in datacenter and cloud computing. This investment illustrates our commitment to supporting the most promising technologies worldwide,” said Michel Chu, president and CEO of ITIC (Industrial Technology Investment Corporation) in Taiwan.