Salience Labs has raised $125 million (£94m) to build connectivity infrastructure for AI data centres.
The photonic solutions firm was founded in 2021 and backed by over a decade of research from the University of Oxford and the University of Münster in Germany.
Its innovative developments in photonic switching technology enable high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads.
The Series B funding round was led by Bullhound Capital, with principal Callum Stewart joining the board of directors. AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank joined the round, alongside continued support from existing shareholders including Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.
Salience Labs will accelerate the deployment of its optical circuit switching technology, scale its volume manufacturing operations and expand its US presence in Silicon Valley.
“OCS will play a critical role in AI data centre networking,” said Vaysh Kewada (pictured), 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.”
The all-optical switch architecture is purpose-built to be deployed at scale to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks for optimal scale-up network performance, it says.
“The investor base and customer relationships Salience Labs has developed really speak to the capability of the leadership,” said Stewart.
“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.”
Salience is now expanding its global footprint and will open a second West Coast location.
“AI infrastructure is increasingly being designed at rack scale, where networking has a direct impact on system performance, efficiency and economics,” said Patrick Rundell, director, AMD Ventures.
“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.”
Srini Ananth, managing director at Intel Capital, added: “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.”
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