Salience Labs Raises $125m for Photonic Switching
Series B funding will support high-volume manufacturing of integrated optical circuit switches and expansion in Silicon Valley.
Salience Labs has raised $125 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round to scale its photonic switching technology for AI datacentre infrastructure.
The round was led by Bullhound Capital, with participation from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank, alongside existing investors. Bullhound Capital principal Callum Stewart will join Salience Labs’ board of directors.
The Oxford, UK-based company will use the funding to accelerate deployment of its optical circuit switching (OCS) technology, expand volume manufacturing and establish a larger presence in Silicon Valley.
Salience Labs develops fully integrated, all-optical switches designed to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks.
Its technology targets networking bottlenecks in AI datacentres, where increasing data traffic places growing demands on performance, latency, power consumption and efficiency.
The funding follows the company’s demonstration of a 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, which it described as an industry first for silicon photonics OCS. Future development plans include 128-port and 256-port switches to support larger-scale optical networks.
Salience Labs will continue working with manufacturing and technology partners, including Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor, to scale production.
The company’s technology builds on more than a decade of silicon photonics research at the University of Oxford and the University of Münster.
As AI infrastructure increasingly adopts rack-scale architectures, optical circuit switching is emerging as a potential approach to improving connectivity between computing resources.
Salience Labs aims to extend optical connectivity across scale-up and scale-out networks, addressing performance and efficiency challenges as AI datacentres grow.
