OpenLight secures $34M in Series A funding to advance its AI data center photonics mission
Key Highlights
- Series A co-led by Xora Innovation and Capricorn marks OpenLight's transition from a Synopsys subsidiary to a venture-backed company
- Covered by more than 360 patents, OpenLight's PDK gives customers access to a library of passive and active components
- Foundry-validated PDK accelerates time-to-market and enables scaled manufacturing of heterogeneously integrated III-V photonics
OpenLight, a custom Photonic Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (PASIC) chip design and manufacturing company, has closed its oversubscribed $34 million Series A funding round.
Co-led by Xora Innovation and Capricorn Investment Group, Mayfield, Juniper Networks (now part of HPE), Lam Capital, New Legacy Ventures and K2 Access also participated in the round.
With this funding round complete, OpenLight has successfully transitioned from a Synopsys subsidiary to a venture-backed company, positioning itself to address the growing demand for faster and more energy-efficient data movement in AI data center networks.
“This funding will allow us to scale our operations, deepen our R&D efforts and bring our groundbreaking products to market faster,” said Dr. Adam Carter, CEO of OpenLight. “We believe heterogeneous integrated silicon photonics will transform the way data is processed and transmitted, and we're excited to be at the forefront of this revolution."
What are integrated photonics?
Integrated photonics combines optical components like waveguides, lasers, and detectors onto a single microchip to manipulate and transmit light, similar to how electronics integrate transistors and wires on a chip. This allows for smaller, faster, and more efficient optical systems, offering benefits like high-speed data transmission, lower power consumption, and the miniaturization of complex optical functions. Applications range from modern telecommunications and data centers to quantum technologies, medical imaging, and sensors.
Integrated photonics rising
Integrated photonics is emerging as a core enabler of next-generation data center infrastructure, with the shift from electrical to optical interconnects accelerating to support AI-scale workloads. OpenLight's technology also has applicability in other applications, including telecom, automotive and industrial sensing, IoT sensing, healthcare and quantum computing.
Based on the heterogeneous integration of indium phosphide and silicon photonics, OpenLight's Process Design Kit (PDK) gives customers access to a library of passive and active components covering integrated lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors.
This PDK has been validated at one of the major photonics foundries, Tower Semiconductor, ensuring designs are production-ready from day one. This enables customers to create custom PASICs using proven building blocks, simplifying advanced chip development and accelerating time-to-market.
Focus on growth
OpenLight currently holds more than 360 patents covering its PDK and the manufacturing of heterogeneously integrated III-V photonics. The OpenLight PDK is already being used by over 20 companies to design and fabricate PASICs across a wide spectrum of applications.
With the new capital in hand, OpenLight will expand its PDK library of active and passive photonics components, including its 400 Gbps modulator and indium phosphide heterogeneously integrated on-chip laser technology.
OpenLight will also ramp up its standards-based reference PICs at 1.6 Tbps and 3.2 Tbps to provide customers with a flexible design library available in the market. In addition, the company will scale its team to support customers as they transition to volume production over the next 12 months.
Phil Inagaki, Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer, Xora, said, “III-V heterogeneous integration is one of the foundational capabilities” that will enable the growth of photonics.
“One of the critical challenges for the photonics industry in the back half of this decade will be achieving scale, and we see OpenLight's PDK as an important part of the solution,” he said.
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Sean Buckley
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