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HedgeCo.Net \u2014 Oxford-based Salience Labs, a developer of all-optical circuit switching technology for AI data centers, has raised an oversubscribed $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital. Intel Capital, AMD Ventures, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank joined as new investors, while existing backers including Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures also participated.<\/p>\n
The company is targeting a bottleneck that has become central to AI infrastructure economics. Most data centers still rely on electronic switches and repeated optical-to-electrical-to-optical conversions, which co-founder and chief executive Vaysh Kewada argues cannot keep pace with the throughput demands of clusters built from tens of thousands of accelerators. Salience has developed an integrated, silicon photonics-based switch architecture designed to route data optically, reducing latency and power consumption.<\/p>\n
At the ECOC 2026 conference in September, Salience demonstrated what it described as the world’s first 64-port all-optical photonic switch, and said denser 128-port and 256-port configurations are under development. The company cited Cignal AI data forecasting that the optical circuit switching market will exceed $8 billion by the end of the decade. Proceeds will go toward volume manufacturing, geographic expansion and research on the higher-density switches.<\/p>\n
The cap table is worth noting. Strategic participation from the venture arms of two leading chipmakers signals that incumbents see optical switching as complementary to their roadmaps, while the participation of quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading adds a backer whose own business depends on low-latency networking.<\/p>\n
For venture investors, the round is another example of capital moving down the AI stack, from models and applications toward networking, power and interconnect, where improvements in efficiency translate directly into the cost of running large workloads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HedgeCo.Net \u2014 Oxford-based Salience Labs, a developer of all-optical circuit switching technology for AI data centers, has raised an oversubscribed $125 million Series B led by Bul\u2026 Continue reading