Salience Labs, an Oxford based photonics company founded in 2021, has raised 125 million dollars in a Series B round to develop and manufacture optical circuit switching for AI data center connectivity. The round was led by Bullhound Capital and included AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank, alongside existing investors.
The company said the funding will accelerate deployment of its optical circuit switching technology, scale volume manufacturing and expand its presence in Silicon Valley. Salience debuted a 32 port all optical switch in March 2026 and unveiled a 64 port version in September, which it describes as an industry first for silicon photonics optical circuit switching, with 128 and 256 port configurations planned.
Chief executive Vaysh Kewada framed the constraint plainly in comments reported by SDxCentral: network limits cap the size of the scale up domain, so utilization and latency on expensive accelerator fleets depend on the interconnect. That is the same bottleneck Celestica’s co-packaged optics switch, also in today’s edition, is built to address.