Relativity Networks, a provider of next-generation fiber optic technology, has raised $6.1 million in seed funding to commercialize its hollow-core fiber (HCF) technology. 

The investments bring the company’s total amount raised to $10.7 million. In February, Relativity Networks emerged from stealth with $4.6 million in pre-seed funding and signed a long-term partnership the following month with Prysmian to bring its next-generation fiber-topic cable to market at scale. The company said it has already begun to deliver HCF to hyperscalers.

“As data centers face unprecedented energy demands and latency requirements, our hollow-core fiber technology delivers the critical infrastructure backbone needed to support this exponential growth,” said Jason Eichenholz, founder and CEO of Relativity Networks. “This funding — along with our continued partnership with Prysmian — allows us to accelerate our ability to meet the surging demand for infrastructure that can handle AI's massive computational requirements.”

The company’s HCF technology allows data to move faster with lower latency than conventional fiber, thereby enabling data to travel 1.5x farther without influencing latency that can throw multilocation data operations and applications out of sync. While traditional fiber optic cables typically limit data centers to within 60 km of each other due to latency constraints, Relativity Networks’ HCF technology extends this range to 90 km, the company said. This increased geographic flexibility allows organizations to strategically position their data centers closer to existing and emerging power sources.

Eichenholz previously co-founded and took lidar company Luminar public. He holds more than 90 patents in optics and photonics-enabled technologies and has led the R&D and commercialization of numerous products. Relativity is working to develop and roll-out patent-pending HCF technology developed by company co-founder and CTO Rodrigo Amezcua Correa at the University of Central Florida’s College of Optics and Photonics. The company’s pre-seed funding was raised by a group of private investors following an initial investment from Eichenholz.

The company said that it has already secured multimillion dollar contracts and has deployed its technology in several U.S. field installations.