Quintessent, a developer of heterogeneous silicon photonics and quantum dot laser technology, has closed on just over $11.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round. According to company CEO and co-founder Alan Liu, the funding will be used to expand the company's staff and accelerate the development of scalable optical interconnects build on the company's multiwavelength comb laser, among other technologies. Quintessent seeks to address infrastructure bottlenecks for data centers and computing technologies by implementing advanced materials, device/circuit design, and link architecture in order to reduce power consumption and required component count. The company previously formalized a collaboration with Tower Semiconductor and, last year, the collaborators announced what they claimed to be the first heterogeneous integration of GaAs quantum dot lasers and a foundry silicon photonics platform (PH18DB). This PH18DB platform is targeted for optical transceiver modules in data centers and telecom networks, as well as emerging applications in artificial intelligence, machine learning, lidar, and other sensors. Manny Stockman, a partner at Osage University Partners, which led the round, will join Quintessent’s board of directors.