Salience Labs, an Oxfordshire photonics company, has raised an oversubscribed $125 million Series B round led by Bullhound Capital. AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank also joined the round, the company said. The money will go toward scaling manufacturing and opening a second West Coast office.
The company was founded in 2021 and sits in Milton, Oxfordshire. Its technology grows out of more than a decade of research at the University of Oxford and the University of Munster, and part of the funding comes from British state money.
The pitch is simple. Most switches convert an optical signal to electrical form to route it, then convert it back to light. Salience's approach, known as optical circuit switching, sets up a path for the signal itself, so the light never has to change form. That matters to operators of AI data centers, where large volumes of data move between chips.
In September, Salience showed a 64-port all-optical switch at the ECOC conference. That followed a 32-port version launched in the spring, which Keysight validated, according to SDxCentral. The unit fits in a standard 1U box, the industry term for a rack space about 1.75 inches tall. The 128-port and 256-port switches that the new money is meant to help fund have no release date.
Nvidia is not part of the round, and the company has not named any customers. Salience already has an engineering team in California, and its chief executive splits her time between the two locations. The new office will add a second West Coast base, but no customer, deployment or qualification date has been disclosed.
A British rival, Oriole Networks, is further along with less money. Oriole is deploying its optical circuit switching platform in the UK government's £50 million ARIA lab alongside AMD chips. The company has raised about $35 million in total.
AMD's own product roadmap supports both copper and optical links in its MI500 GPUs, with the optical side extending in 2027. That reflects AMD's plans, though, not an order for Salience.
The gap in funding is wide. Lumilens left stealth mode in August with more than $700 million at a $5.51 billion valuation, and it is already shipping into a hyperscaler's live data centers.
The size of the opportunity explains the rush. Dell'Oro Group expects cumulative spending on switches in AI back-end networks to approach $1 trillion between 2026 and 2030, with more than half of that going to scale-up networks.
Europe has seen this pattern before. PhotonDelta opened a Silicon Valley hub in 2024 to connect Dutch and American photonics companies, two years after the Dutch government committed €1.1 billion in state money.
Policy in Britain is moving in a different direction. In June, the technology secretary said the government would buy AI chips from British firms to keep them from leaving for the United States. The announcement came after Graphcore and Alphawave were acquired by foreign buyers.
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