Silicon Photonics Company Xscape Photonics Raises $44M

Silicon photonics startup Xscape Photonics has raised $44 million — funding that the company said it plans to use to accelerate development of its ChromX platform. The scalable, multi-color, programmable photonics platform is designed for AI data center fabrics. To date, the company has raised $57 million, following the $44 million Series A close.

Xscape Photonics’ silicon photonics-based ChromX platform is designed to address critical bottlenecks in data centers to enable greater bandwidth for demanding artificial intelligence applications. Courtesy of Xscape Photonics.

Xscape Photonics’ technology addresses bottlenecks in AI and data centers related to bandwidth demand, with a platform capable of handling hundreds of colors on a single fiber. Data centers have traditionally been constrained to transmit data streams over four colors on a single fiber.

“Historically, performance and scalability challenges have been addressed by building bigger data centers to train large language models," said Vivek Raghunathan, co-founder and CEO of Xscape Photonics. "This approach is not sustainable and unlocks a myriad of additional issues around energy consumption and cost.”

The company was founded in 2022 by silicon photonics luminaries and laser specialists Vivek Raghunathan, Alexander Gaeta, Yoshi Okawarchi, Michal Lipson, and Keren Bergman. The recent financing was led by IAG Capital Partners with investment from Altair, Cisco Investments, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, NVIDIA, and OUP.