iPronics is Scaling Programmable Optical Networking for AI Data Centers with New Funding

iPronics, a pioneer in silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching for AI infrastructure, led by Christian Dupont, Daniel Pérez-López, and the team, has announced $125 million in Series B funding co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital. NVIDIA joined the round, with participation from new and existing investors including Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, European Innovation Council Fund, The Tate Family Trust, Fine Structure Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Build Collective, and Criteria Venture Tech, bringing the company’s total funding to $177 million.

“Securing this support from Maverick Silicon, Light Street Capital, and NVIDIA strengthens our vision as we build iPronics into a new class of optical networking leaders,” said Christian Dupont, CEO of iPronics. “With this investment, we can significantly accelerate our commercialization, delivering the scale our customers need to drive broad adoption and ensuring data centers can fully utilize their GPUs without compromising performance.”

AI data centers are accelerating the adoption of optical circuit switching (OCS) as growing AI clusters push scale-up networks from copper to optics. Built on silicon photonics, iPronics has developed a compact, purpose-built OCS platform for high-density AI connectivity, helping hyperscalers scale capacity while managing power, cost, and complexity.

“The explosive growth of AI workloads has pushed traditional network infrastructure to its power and bandwidth limits, making optical circuit switching more critical than ever,” said Manish Muthal, senior managing director at Maverick Silicon. “We’re proud to co-lead this round and partner with the iPronics team, as they expand commercial deployments worldwide.”

Muthal joins the iPronics board alongside Geoffrey Tate, a veteran technology executive who previously led Rambus and Flex Logix as CEO. Tate also held senior leadership roles at AMD and currently serves on the board of Ayar Labs.

“Light Street is excited to co-lead this Series B,” said Shef Osborn, partner at Light Street Capital. “We believe iPronics offers the most scalable and cost-effective approach to solid-state optical switching at the interconnect layer, a critical requirement for meeting AI compute demand over the next decade.”

Young Sohn of Catalight Capital joins iPronics as an advisor. A veteran of the semiconductor and silicon photonics industries, Sohn previously served as Samsung’s Corporate President and Chief Strategy Officer and CEO of Inphi. He also serves on the boards of Arm and Cadence Design Systems.

“Next-generation AI infrastructure will require a more dynamic, optical-first network fabric,” said Sohn. “iPronics’ approach to programmable optical switching can help data centers scale performance while managing power and cost. I am honored to support the company as it accelerates commercialization.”

The company will use the funds to scale operations, accelerate commercial deployment, and meet growing demand for iPronics ONE, a rack-mounted optical switch built for AI. With integrated control, telemetry, and APIs, ONE enables AI clusters to dynamically reconfigure connectivity for training and inference workloads.

“This Series B is a testament to our team’s relentless execution,” said Dr. Daniel Pérez-López, founder and CTO of iPronics. “Together with our tier-one partners, we are successfully demonstrating that we can build and deploy this technology at scale for AI infrastructure.”

iPronics has opened a new U.S. office in Santa Clara, California, and is hiring across product strategy, customer deployments, and AI infrastructure partnerships.

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