Salience Labs has raised $125 million in a Series B round led by Bullhound Capital, backed by Intel Capital and AMD Ventures, to expand manufacturing and open a second California office. The Oxfordshire startup develops all-optical circuit switches to eliminate electrical signal conversions in AI data centers, reducing latency and energy use. As cumulative AI switch spending heads toward $1 trillion by 2030, Salience Labs competes with rivals like Lumilens and Oriole Networks.
Series B funding and investors
- ▪AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading, and the British Business Bank participated as new investors in Salience Labs' Series B round.
- ▪Returning investors in Salience Labs' Series B round included Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.
- ▪Salience Labs raised $125 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Bullhound Capital.
Use of funding and expansion
- ▪Salience Labs will direct its $125 million Series B funding toward volume manufacturing, geographic expansion, and research and development for 128-port and 256-port switch configurations.
- ▪Salience Labs will use its Series B funding to establish a second West Coast office in California alongside its existing California engineering team.
Optical circuit switching technology benefits
- ▪Intel Capital executive Srini Ananth stated that integrated silicon photonics and proprietary optical amplification enable optical circuit switching to address scaling challenges in AI data centers.
- ▪Conventional data center networking fabrics convert optical signals to electrical form to route traffic, creating latency bottlenecks and increasing power consumption in AI computing clusters.
- ▪Salience Labs' optical circuit switching architecture routes information dynamically on-chip using light without converting signals between optical and electrical forms.
Optical switch demonstrations and validation
- ▪Salience Labs demonstrated a 64-port all-optical photonic switch in a standard 1U box at the ECOC 2026 conference in September 2026.
- ▪Keysight validated a 32-port optical circuit switch launched by Salience Labs in spring 2026.
Market growth forecasts
- ▪Cignal AI forecasts that the market for optical circuit switching will grow to more than $8 billion by the end of the decade.
- ▪Dell'Oro expects cumulative spending on switches in AI back-end networks to approach $1 trillion between 2026 and 2030.
Competitor funding and developments
- ▪Optical interconnect company Lumilens emerged from stealth in August 2026 after raising over $700 million at a $5.51 billion valuation to supply live hyperscaler data centers.
- ▪British rival Oriole Networks raised approximately $35 million in total funding and deployed its optical circuit switching platform in the UK government's £50 million ARIA lab.
UK government tech policy context
- ▪In June 2026, the UK technology secretary stated the British government would purchase AI chips from domestic firms to discourage UK tech companies from moving operations to the United States.
- ▪UK technology companies Graphcore and Alphawave were sold to foreign buyers prior to the British government's domestic AI chip purchasing announcement.
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