Salience Labs raises USD $125 million for AI networking

Salience Labs has raised USD $125 million in a Series B funding round led by Bullhound Capital.

The Oxford-based photonic networking company said the oversubscribed round included backing from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank, alongside existing investors Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.

As part of the investment, Bullhound Capital Principal Callum Stewart will join the board.

Salience Labs plans to use the funding to expand deployment of its optical circuit switching technology for AI datacentres, increase manufacturing volume and grow its presence in Silicon Valley.

The company develops photonic chips for datacentre connectivity. Its switching architecture is designed to link thousands of GPUs across multiple racks in AI systems, where network design can affect performance, efficiency, power use and cost.

The financing follows a live demonstration of Salience Labs' 64-port all-optical photonic switch, which it described as an industry first for silicon photonics optical circuit switching.

The new capital will also support development of future 128-port and 256-port optical circuit switches.

Investor backing

"OCS will play a critical role in AI datacenter networking," said Vaysh Kewada, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Salience Labs.

"As customers roll out optical links in their datacenters, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that workloads demand. Salience Labs has demonstrated a market-leading technology: a fully integrated on-chip solution that scales well to high-volume manufacturing. This funding, alongside the support of our investors AMD Ventures and Intel Capital, will accelerate our growth into high-volume production to enable world-leading performance in AI data centers," Kewada said.

Salience Labs is targeting a market investors expect to expand rapidly as AI infrastructure grows. Dell'Oro Group has forecast that cumulative spending on datacentre switches in AI back-end networks will approach USD $1 trillion over the next five years, with scale-up systems expected to account for more than half of that market by 2030.

Bullhound Capital said Salience Labs had built investor support and customer relationships around a switching design aimed at current and longer-term datacentre roadmaps.

"The investor base and customer relationships Salience Labs has developed really speak to the capability of the leadership: Vaysh has assembled a strong team fully focused on designing a switch architecture that both aligns with customers' near-term roadmaps but also scales with them far into the future. Bullhound Capital is proud to back this transformational company that is bringing to reality the next generation of high-performance data centers," said Callum Stewart, Principal at Bullhound Capital.

AI networking

Backers from the semiconductor industry also pointed to pressure on network design as AI systems move to rack-scale deployments.

"AI infrastructure is increasingly being designed at rack scale, where networking has a direct impact on system performance, efficiency and economics. Salience Labs is developing a differentiated, integrated optical switching architecture aimed at addressing these challenges, and AMD Ventures is pleased to support the team as it scales its technology and manufacturing capabilities," said Patrick Rundell, Director at AMD Ventures.

Intel Capital highlighted the role of photonics in handling datacentre bottlenecks linked to AI workloads and larger computing clusters.

"Photonics is quickly becoming essential to scaling AI infrastructure, and optical circuit switching can unlock significant gains in performance and efficiency," said Srini Ananth, Managing Director at Intel Capital.

"Salience Labs stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification, addressing key challenges to deploying optical switching at scale," Ananth said.

Salience Labs said it would continue working with organisations including Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor as it expands manufacturing for higher-volume production.

The business traces its technology to more than a decade of silicon photonics research at the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Münster in Germany.