Similarly, Salience Labs (Oxford, U.K.) announced a $30M Series A round led by ICM HPQC Fund and Applied Ventures, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials (Santa Clara, CA), to advance its optical switch technology and enable new interconnect network architectures for AI clusters.
Hyperlume (Ottawa, ON, Canada), a startup proposing high-bandwidth and low-power interconnects based on microLEDs for high-performance computing and AI infrastructure, raised a $12.5M seed round led by BDC’s Deep Tech Venture Fund and ArcTern Ventures.
Finally, Relativity Networks, based in Florida and led by former Luminar Technologies co-founder Jason Eichenholz, is working to solve the power scaling problem in datacenters by focusing on the fiber itself and announced a $4.6M pre-seed round to advance hollow-core fiber technology developed at the University of Central Florida.
As mentioned, there were also two venture deals supporting companies that are leveraging photonics in an interesting way to make critical measurements. Spore.Bio (Paris, France) is developing devices that use advanced machine learning and optical methods to identify harmful bacteria onsite within seconds, which helps manufacturers ensure product safety. The company raised a $23M Series A round led by Singular, with several additional funds participating—including Point 72 Ventures and 1st Kind Ventures.
Lastly, Wooptix (Madrid, Spain), a company developing semiconductor metrology equipment based on wavefront phase imaging technology, announced a €10M Series C round led by Samsung Ventures and Spanish Society for Technological Transformation, with participation from existing investors.