Salience Labs Raises $125 Million Series B for All-Optical AI Datacenter Switching
Oxford spin-out Salience Labs raised a $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and a £10 million investment from the British Business Bank. Proceeds go to volume manufacturing, U.S. expansion and denser switches after an ECOC 2026 64-port all-optical demo.
Named silicon investors and UK public capital are backing the optical switch in the middle of the GPU cluster. On October 14, the British Business Bank said it had invested £10 million in Salience Labs as part of a $125 million Series B led by UK-headquartered Bullhound Capital, alongside AMD Ventures and Intel Capital.
The round
New investors also include SBI Group and Hudson River Trading, the Bank said. Existing shareholders Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures returned. Salience Labs, founded in 2021, is a spin-out from the University of Oxford and the University of Münster that builds optical circuit switching for AI datacenter networking.
Proceeds will accelerate deployment, scale volume manufacturing and expand the company’s U.S. presence, according to the Bank. SiliconANGLE reported the same round and said the money will also fund research and development of higher-density switches.
What Salience says it has built
CEO and co-founder Vaysh Kewada said optical circuit switching will play a critical role in AI datacenter networking and that high-performance optical switches are needed “to deliver the token economics that workloads demand.” SiliconANGLE reported that Salience demonstrated a 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026 in September and that denser 128-port and 256-port configurations are under development. SiliconANGLE’s headline calls the demo the “world’s most advanced” fully optical circuit-switching tech; that framing is the outlet’s and the company’s, not an independent ranking.
Charlotte Lawrence, Managing Director and Head of Direct Equity at the British Business Bank, said today’s AI datacentres are “increasingly limited by the efficiency of the networking.” Intel Capital’s Srini Ananth, quoted by SiliconANGLE, said Salience “stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification.”
Limits
- Performance and “market leading” claims are company and investor statements; commercial scale is not independently audited here.
- No valuation was disclosed.
- SiliconANGLE cites a Cignal AI forecast for the optical circuit-switching market; that forecast was not checked for this article.