Salience Labs Plans to Scale Photonic Networking Chips for AI Data Center Infrastructure with New Funding

Salience Labs, a leader in photonic chips targeting connectivity for AI data center infrastructure, led by Vaysh Kewada and Johannes Feldmann, has announced the successful completion of an oversubscribed $125 million Series B funding round. The round is led by Bullhound Capital, with Principal Callum Stewart joining the Salience Labs Board of Directors. Additional investor participation came from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank, as well as continued support from existing shareholders including Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.

The funding will help Salience Labs scale OCS technology deployment, expand manufacturing, and strengthen its Silicon Valley presence.

“OCS will play a critical role in AI datacenter networking,” said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs. “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.”  

Salience Labs’ integrated all-optical switch architecture connects thousands of GPUs across racks, optimizing scale-up network 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,” said Bullhound Capital Principal Callum Stewart.

Following the industry-first live demo of its 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, Salience Labs will use the funding to develop 128- and 256-port OCS solutions, expand datacenter networking capabilities, and advance AI infrastructure.

“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,” said Patrick Rundell, Director, AMD Ventures.

Dell’Oro Group projects nearly $1 trillion in AI datacenter switch spending from 2026–2030, with scale-up networks accounting for over half the market by 2030. All-optical connectivity offers a solution to growing network and compute bottlenecks, improving performance, efficiency, power consumption, and cost.

“Photonics is quickly becoming essential to scaling AI infrastructure, and optical circuit switching can unlock significant gains in performance and efficiency,” said Srini Ananth, Managing Director at Intel Capital. “Salience Labs stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification, addressing key challenges to deploying optical switching at scale.”

Salience Labs plans to expand into new global markets, scale high-volume manufacturing with partners including Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor, and establish a second West Coast location in Silicon Valley. Backed by over a decade of silicon photonics research, the company is also expanding its engineering team to advance optical networking for AI data centers.