Silicon photonics firm Salience Labs, UK, has raised US$125 million in series B funding. The company says that the funding will support the deployment of its optical circuit switching (OCS) technology, scale its manufacturing capabilities and expand its presence in Silicon Valley, USA, with a second West Coast location.

“Salience Labs has demonstrated a market-leading technology: a fully integrated on-chip solution that scales well to high-volume manufacturing,” said Salience cofounder and CEO Vaysh Kewada in a press release. “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 switch to all optical

Salience Labs spun out from the University of Oxford, UK, and the University of Münster, Germany, in 2021 to commercialize a photonic version of in-memory computing. Since its founding, the company has focused on accelerating AI with its proprietary, CMOS-compatible silicon photonics processors and technology.

Now, Salience is focusing on all-optical switches for AI data centers, announcing its all-optical 32-port switch in March 2026 and then demonstrating its 64-port version at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in September. The company says this newer version of its switch is an industry first for silicon photonic OCS technology and will improve network latency, throughput and reliability metrics for data centers, while also lowering power consumption.

“OCS will play a critical role in AI data center networking,” said Kewada. “As customers roll out optical links in their data centers, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that workloads demand.”

Looking to the future, Salience says its series B funding will allow it to develop 128- and 256-port OCS to grow with the increasing demands on data centers from AI. The all-optical approach, according to the company, is meant to address network and compute bottlenecks while improving efficiency and lowering cost.

An eye toward growth

The latest funding round was led by Bullhound Capital, whose investment principal Callum Stewart joined the Salience Labs’ board of directors. Additional investors included AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank, as well as existing shareholders Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures. It follows on the heels of a round worth US$11.5 million in 2022 and a series A round worth US$30 million in 2025.

As another part of its growth strategy, Salience Labs has leaned into technological partnerships including with US-based companies Tower Semiconductor and Keysight Technologies. These partnerships, announced in February and March 2026, respectively, are aimed at scaling the company’s manufacturing operations for high volume.

“Optical switching is moving networks from electronic packet routing to highly predictable, energy-efficient optical connectivity. We are transforming the networking layer, unlocking the ability to extend scale-up and scale-out networks across the datacenter,” said Kewada. “Our dedicated team of researchers and engineers has a clear product roadmap, delivering all-optical switches that improve latency to increase performance and enhance end-user experience to unlock true value from AI.”