OpenLight closes $34 million Series A funding round
The company plans to use the new investment to expand its PDK library, which is based on the heterogeneous integration of indium phosphide and silicon photonics, and scale its team to support customers as they transition to volume production
OpenLight, a company focusing on custom photonic application-specific integrated circuit (PASIC) chip design and manufacturing based on heterogeneous integration, has announced that it has closed its oversubscribed $34 million Series A funding round. The round is co-led by Xora Innovation and Capricorn Investment Group. Other participants include Mayfield; Juniper Networks, now part of HPE; Lam Capital, the corporate venture arm of Lam Research Corporation; New Legacy Ventures; and K2 Access.
OpenLight says that this round of financing completes its transition from a Synopsys subsidiary to a high-velocity, venture-backed company positioned to address the growing demand for faster and more energy-efficient data movement in AI datacentre networks. As the shift from electrical to optical interconnects accelerates to support AI-scale workloads, integrated photonics is emerging as a core enabler of next-generation datacentre infrastructure. Additional applications for OpenLight's technology include telecom, automotive and industrial sensing, IoT sensing, healthcare and quantum computing.
OpenLight has developed a Process Design Kit (PDK), based on the heterogeneous integration of indium phosphide and silicon photonics, which aims to give customers access to a library of passive and active components covering integrated lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors. The company says its PDK has been validated at the leading photonics foundry Tower Semiconductor, ensuring designs are production-ready from day one. According to OpenLight, this enables customers to create custom PASICs using proven building blocks, simplifying advanced chip development and accelerating time to market. The company adds that it currently holds more than 360 patents covering its PDK and the manufacturing of heterogeneously integrated III-V photonics, and that its PDK is already being used by over 20 companies to design and fabricate PASICs across a wide spectrum of applications.
With the new capital injection, OpenLight plans to expand its PDK library of active and passive photonics components, including its 400G modulator and indium phosphide heterogeneously integrated on-chip laser technology. The company also aims to ramp up its standard-based reference PICs at 1.6T and 3.2T to provide customers with the most flexible and leading-edge component design library available in the market. In addition, OpenLight says it will scale its team to support customers as they transition to volume production over the next 12 months.
“As we enter this next phase of our company's growth, we are excited to be adding such strong investors with deep roots and expertise in the semiconductor and photonics industry,” said Adam Carter, CEO of OpenLight. “With this strong syndicate of investors, we can push the boundaries of innovation and deliver transformative solutions to our customers. This funding will allow us to scale our operations, deepen our R&D efforts and bring our groundbreaking products to market faster. We believe heterogeneous integrated silicon photonics will transform the way data is processed and transmitted, and we're excited to be at the forefront of this revolution.”
Phil Inagaki, managing partner and chief investment officer at Xora, commented: “Xora has conviction that the field of photonics is going to see exponential growth in the coming years, and III-V heterogeneous integration is one of the foundational capabilities that will enable this growth. We see OpenLight not only as a technology leader in this field, but also as a company positioned to quickly scale manufacturing with foundry partners. One of the critical challenges for the photonics industry in the back half of this decade will be achieving scale, and we see OpenLight's PDK as an important part of the solution.”
Dipender Saluja, managing partner at Capricorn's Technology Impact Funds, added: “Optical connectivity in datacentres has become critical for next-generation scale-up and scale-out AI architectures. OpenLight's heterogeneous integration delivers on all three axes of performance, reliability and cost, which will enable the explosive growth of optical IO. With the industry's leading team, open PDKs, strong foundry and customer relationships, OpenLight is best positioned to meet the scale of demand that is needed for next-generation AI hardware.”
