Salience Labs secures $125m in series B funding to scale photonic networking chips for AI datacentre infrastructure
Milton Park based Salience Labs, a leader in photonic chips targeting connectivity for AI datacentre infrastructure, today announced the successful completion of an oversubscribed $125 million Series B funding round. The round is led by Bullhound Capital, with Principal Callum Stewart joining the Salience Labs Board of Directors. Additional investor participation came from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank, as well as continued support from existing shareholders including Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.
With this new funding, Salience Labs will accelerate the deployment of its optical circuit switching (OCS) technology, scale its volume manufacturing operations and expand its U.S. presence in Silicon Valley as the company continues to transform the networking layer of datacentre infrastructure.
“OCS will play a critical role in AI datacentre networking,” said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs.
“As customers roll out optical links in their datacentres, 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. This funding, alongside the support of our investors AMD Ventures and Intel Capital, will accelerate our growth into high-volume production to enable world-leading performance in AI data centres.”
Vaysh Kewada, CEO and Johannes Feldmann CTO, co-founders of Salience Labs
Salience Labs’ all-optical, fully integrated switch architecture is purpose-built to be deployed at scale to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks for optimal scale-up network performance in AI datacentres.
“The investor base and customer relationships Salience Labs has developed really speak to the capability of the leadership: Vaysh has assembled a strong team fully focused on designing a switch architecture that both aligns with customers’ near-term roadmaps but also scales with them far into the future. Bullhound Capital is proud to back this transformational company that is bringing to reality the next generation of high-performance data centres,” said Bullhound Capital Principal Callum Stewart.
The financing comes on the heels of Salience Labs’ live demo of its 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, an industry first for silicon photonics OCS. The funding will enable future solutions including 128- and 256- port OCS, unlocking new use cases across data-intensive and performance-critical environments. Salience Labs is well positioned to expand and further develop its circuit switch technology, enabling the extension of scale-up and scale-out networks across the datacentre and realizing the true potential of AI.
“AI infrastructure is increasingly being designed at rack scale, where networking has a direct impact on system performance, efficiency and economics. Salience Labs is developing a differentiated, integrated optical switching architecture aimed at addressing these challenges, and AMD Ventures is pleased to support the team as it scales its technology and manufacturing capabilities,” said Patrick Rundell, Director, AMD Ventures.
Dell’Oro Group forecasts that cumulative spending on datacentre switches deployed in AI back-end networks to support next-generation AI infrastructure will approach $1 trillion over the next five years (2026-2030). Scale-up is projected to account for more than half of the market by 2030. All-optical connectivity is a frontrunner to address the network and compute bottlenecks caused by the growing demand for datacentre capacity that negatively impacts performance, efficiency, power consumption and cost.
“Photonics is quickly becoming essential to scaling AI infrastructure, and optical circuit switching can unlock significant gains in performance and efficiency,” said Srini Ananth, Managing Director at Intel Capital. “Salience Labs stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification, addressing key challenges to deploying optical switching at scale.”
Salience Labs’ growth strategy also targets global expansion into new geographic markets, expanding its global footprint and engaging with customers and partners. Salience Labs will continue to engage with organizations including Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor to scale its manufacturing operations for high volume. Additionally, the company will also build out its Silicon Valley offices, where it will open a second West Coast location. This broader market presence will position the company to capitalize on growing demand for high-performance connectivity solutions in AI datacentres.
Engineering the future of optical infrastructure, Salience Labs’ technology is the result of over 10 years of research in silicon photonics.
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