Salience Labs raises $125M after showcasing world’s most advanced, fully optical circuit-switching tech
A startup called Salience Labs Inc. wants to play a bigger role in speeding up artificial intelligence workloads after raising $125 million in a Series B funding. Today’s round was led by Bullhound Capital and saw the two of the chipmaking industry’s most iconic names participate via their investment arms, Intel Capital AMD Ventures. SBI Group, […] The post Salience Labs raises $125M after…
Salience Labs has successfully secured $125 million in a Series B funding round to advance its all-optical circuit-switching technology, designed to accelerate artificial intelligence workloads in data centers. The funding round, led by Bullhound Capital, saw participation from prominent chipmaking industry players, including Intel Capital, AMD Ventures, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading, and the British Business Bank.
Existing investors such as Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Silicon Catalyst Ventures also continued their support.
The startup's cutting-edge technology aims to address the inefficiencies of traditional networking fabrics, which rely on multiple signal conversions and cannot keep up with the high throughput demands of AI computing clusters. Salience Labs' all-optical and fully integrated silicon photonics-based network switch architecture eliminates electrical signals in the data center, enabling dynamic routing of information directly on-chip.
This results in lower latency and reduced power consumption, paving the way for companies to scale their GPU clusters significantly.
At the ECOC 2026 conference in September, Salience Labs demonstrated the most advanced version of its optical circuit-switching technology, showcasing the world's first 64-port all-optical photonic switch. The company is currently developing denser 128-port and 256-port configurations to support "scale-up and scale-out" of network fabrics across data-intensive environments.
With the forecasted market for optical circuit switching growing to over $8 billion by the end of the decade, Salience Labs is well-positioned to capture a substantial share of this opportunity. The company's focus on volume manufacturing, geographic market expansion, and higher-density switch development will be driven by the latest funding, with Intel Capital's Srini Ananth highlighting the performance and efficiency gains offered by optical switching.
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