Salience Labs wins $30m Series A cash for AI data centre play

The round was led by ICM HPQC Fund and Applied Ventures, LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, Inc., to further development of the company’s optical switches for large scale AI connectivity.

Applied Ventures and ICM HPQC Fund are joined by Braavo alongside continued participation from existing investors Oxford Sciences Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and leaders from the global semiconductor industry including Silicon Catalyst and Jalal Bagherli.

Vaysh Kewada, Co-founder and CEO of Salience Labs, said: “What our customers want is a photonic switch to connect their AI clusters that is compatible with existing infrastructure while delivering high bandwidth, low latency and significant power savings.

“The completion of this round will further our development and help us bring our product to customers to enable not just the savings, but large cluster connectivity.

“We are also excited to be working closely with our strategic investors who are industry leaders to advance our go-to market schedule.”

Anand Kamannavar, Vice President and Global Head of Applied Ventures, added: “Silicon photonics is a promising technology to deliver significant advancements in energy-efficient performance for AI data centres.

“Salience's optical switch solution has the potential to enable a new generation of interconnect network architectures for faster and more efficient AI systems.”

Founded in 2021 and backed by over a decade of research from the University of Oxford in the UK and University of Münster in Germany, Salience’s innovative developments in photonic switching technology enable high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads.