PHOTON IP, a manufacturer of advanced low-power optical chips, has raised €4.75 million ($4.85 million) in seed funding to accelerate the industrialization and commercialization of its technology. PHOTON IP's chip technology combines silicon photonics with active III-V materials and aims to address the limitations that existing schemes for photonic integration face in their inability to deliver necessary levels of performance and energy efficiency in a small footprint. Founded in 2020, PHOTON IP has developed a method to efficiently combine silicon photonics with active III-V materials. Courtesy of PHOTON IP. The company is specifically targeting manufacturing process simplifications stemming from improving the way that silicon and different III-V materials are integrated onto a single photonic chip. PHOTON IP's breakthrough, the company said, opens a path toward mass deployment for advanced low-power optical engines for a wide range of applications. Innovation Industries, Faber, Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij, and PhotonDelta were among those that participated in the seed funding round. The current round follows an initial investment by Vigo Ventures in 2021 and PHOTON IP's first contracts secured with global customers, for which initial products are currently being co-developed and tested.