Salience Labs raises $125M Series B for optical AI data center switches
Oxfordshire photonics company Salience Labs raised an oversubscribed $125M Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank participating. The company says it will use the money to scale manufacturing and open a second West Coast office. Founded in 2021 in Milton, Oxfordshire, it builds on more than a decade of University of Oxford and University of Münster research; it launched a Keysight-validated 32-port all-optical switch in the spring and showed a 64-port version at ECOC in September. The round is meant to fund 128- and 256-port switches, but no date, customer or deployment was disclosed.
All-optical circuit switching keeps signals as light instead of converting them to electrical form, which could cut latency and power in AI back-end networks if it scales.