Oxford-based Salience Labs has raised £24m in Series A financing to further the development of its optical switches for large scale AI connectivity.
The firm, which is said to be a leader in photonic solutions targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure, also appointed Bonnie Tomei as CFO and Dr William Jeffrey as a new board member.
The round was led by ICM HPQC Fund and Applied Ventures, LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, and received participation from existing investors.
“What our customers want is a photonic switch to connect their AI clusters that is compatible with existing infrastructure while delivering high bandwidth, low latency and significant power savings,” said Vaysh Kewada, co-founder and CEO of Salience Labs.
“The completion of this round will further our development and help us bring our product to customers to enable not just the savings, but large cluster connectivity.”
Anand Kamannavar, vice president and global head of Applied Ventures, added: “Silicon photonics is a promising technology to deliver significant advancements in energy-efficient performance for AI data centres.
“Salience’s optical switch solution has the potential to enable a new generation of interconnect network architectures for faster and more efficient AI systems.”
Salience Labs also announced its appointment of Bonnie Tomei, a certified public accountant and an industry veteran located in Silicon Valley, California, as Chief Financial Officer.
Regarding the appointment, Kewada added: “With over 20 years of experience including initial public offerings, de-SPAC and a strong business operations background, Ms. Tomei will be a key member of the executive team to realize our strategic and operational objectives, including expanding to the U.S. to serve our key customers.”
New board member Jeffrey is an astronomer with a career spanning the executive office of the President of the United States, to being the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.