The British startup Salience Labs has completed a $125 million funding round. Bullhound Capital is leading the round, with AMD Ventures and Intel Capital also participating. The company plans to use the funds to scale production of its optical circuit switches for AI data centers and expand its Silicon Valley operations.
In addition to Bullhound Capital, which will gain a seat on the board of directors through Principal Callum Stewart, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading, and the British Business Bank are participating. Existing shareholders such as Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Silicon Catalyst Ventures are also reinvesting.
Salience Labs develops optical circuit switching (OCS). With this technology, data streams are not routed packet by packet electronically. Instead, the switch establishes a direct optical connection between endpoints. This eliminates the need to convert light to electricity and back. Salience’s architecture is fully optical and integrated onto a single chip. It is designed to connect thousands of GPUs spread across multiple racks for scale-up networks.
From 64 to 256 ports
The investment follows shortly after a live demo of a 64-port optical switch at ECOC 2026. According to Salience Labs, this is a first for OCS based on silicon photonics. The company launched a 32-port product earlier this year. With the new funding, it also plans to develop 128- and 256-port versions.
“As customers roll out optical links in their datacenters, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that workloads demand,” says CEO and co-founder Vaysh Kewada. As an investor, Intel Capital highlights in particular the integrated architecture and the company’s proprietary optical amplification technology.
For high-volume production, Salience continues to collaborate with Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor. In addition, the company is expanding its offices in Silicon Valley and opening a second location on the U.S. West Coast. The technology is the result of more than a decade of research into silicon photonics.
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