Salience Labs Raises $125M Series B for Optical AI Switch

Salience Labs has raised $125 million in a Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with Intel Capital, AMD Ventures, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank joining existing backers, SiliconANGLE reported. The company builds all-optical circuit switches for AI data centers, routing light directly between ports instead of converting each hop into electricity and back.

At ECOC 2026 in September, Salience showed what the article calls "the world's first 64-port all-optical photonic switch," with 128-port and 256-port configurations in development. Co-founder and chief executive Vaysh Kewada tied the pitch to GPU cluster economics: "As customers roll out optical links in their data centers, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that AI workloads demand."

Intel Capital's Srini Ananth said Salience "stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification, addressing key challenges to deploying optical switching at scale." Returning investors include Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.

The article publishes no per-port latency or wattage numbers for the 64-port demo. Cignal AI projects the optical circuit switching market will exceed $8 billion by decade's end, and Salience says the fresh capital will fund volume manufacturing, geographic expansion and R&D on higher-density switches.