Salience Labs, a developer of photonic solutions targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure, has closed a $30 million series A funding round. The capital will help the company to further develop its optical switches for large scale AI connectivity. Salience Labs is developing photonic switch chips composed of an optical circuit switch and a low-loss optical fabric supported by electronic control and software for fast switch configuration, temperature and power monitoring, and conventional software interfaces. Courtesy of Salience Labs/Shabbir Bashar "What our customers want is a photonic switch to connect their AI clusters that is compatible with existing infrastructure while delivering high bandwidth, low latency and significant power savings. The completion of this round will further our development and help us bring our product to customers to enable not just the savings, but large cluster connectivity,” said Vaysh Kewada, co-founder and CEO of Salience Labs. In conjunction with the round’s close, the company is appointing William Jeffrey to its board of directors. Jeffrey is chairman of the technical advisory committee on the ICM HPQC Fund, which co-led the funding round. The company also appointed Bonnie Tomei as CFO. Founded by Kewada, CTO Johnnes Feldmann, and Wolfram Pernice, a professor at Heidelberg University and winner of the 2024 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation, Salience Labs is a spinout of the University of Oxford and the University of Münster. The company is developing photonic switching technology to enable high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads by allowing all-optical networking between compute nodes. According to the company, their photonic switch chips eliminate the need for transceivers, thereby reducing costs. Applied Ventures, LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, Inc., co-led the funding round.