Salience Labs, a photonic chips startup targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure, has raised £95 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Bullhound Capital. Additional investors in the round include AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank, alongside continued support from existing shareholders Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures. Bullhound Capital Principal Callum Stewart joins the Salience Labs Board of Directors.
Salience Labs develops all-optical, fully integrated switch architectures designed to be deployed at scale to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks in AI datacenters. The optical circuit switching technology is aimed at delivering high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads. Salience Labs’ integrated on-chip solution is described as scaling well to high-volume manufacturing and is intended to support scale-up and scale-out networks across the datacenter, with all-optical connectivity positioned as a frontrunner to address network and compute bottlenecks caused by growing demand for datacenter capacity.
The financing follows Salience Labs’ live demonstration of its 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, described as an industry first for silicon photonics optical circuit switching. With the new funding, Salience Labs plans to accelerate deployment of its OCS technology, scale volume manufacturing operations and expand its United States presence in Silicon Valley. The funding will also enable future solutions including 128- and 256-port OCS, targeting new use cases across data-intensive and performance-critical environments, and supports a growth strategy focused on global expansion into new geographic markets.
Salience Labs intends to continue working with organisations including Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor to scale manufacturing operations for high volume. Plans include building out Silicon Valley offices and opening a second West Coast location to support engagement with customers and partners and to meet demand for high-performance connectivity solutions in AI datacenters. Salience Labs’ technology is the result of over 10 years of research in silicon photonics, backed by research from the University of Oxford and the University of Münster, and the team is expanding as it pushes the boundaries of optical networking.
OCS will play a critical role in AI datacenter networking. As customers roll out optical links in their datacenters, 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 centers.
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 centers.
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.
Photonics is quickly becoming essential to scaling AI infrastructure, and optical circuit switching can unlock significant gains in performance and efficiency. Salience Labs stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification, addressing key challenges to deploying optical switching at scale.
