Photon Bridge Raises €10 Mn to Tackle AI’s Emerging Laser Bottleneck

The funding round was co-led by new investors Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital. Existing investors Innovation Industries, Faber and Brabant Development Agency (BOM) also increased their investments.

According to Omdia, more than 20 million AI accelerators used in data centres are expected to ship each year by 2028. As AI systems grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands of processors, moving data quickly between chips is becoming a major challenge.

Goldman Sachs Research expects the market for optical networking to grow ninefold, reaching $154 billion by 2028. This growth is being driven by the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and the increasing computing power of data centre systems.

Optical connections use light to transfer data between chips, offering higher speeds and better energy efficiency than traditional electrical connections. The technology is moving closer to processors through a development known as co-packaged optics, which places optical connections directly alongside chips. However, this shift also creates a need for a much larger supply of lasers, which produce the light required to transmit data.

“AI is fundamentally changing the way computing infrastructure is built,” said Paul Marchal, CEO of Photon Bridge. “We are moving towards enormous systems in which hundreds of thousands of processors have to operate together, and moving data between them is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance.

“That means optics has to move closer to the compute. But it also creates an entirely different manufacturing challenge. The industry will soon need millions of these laser sources every year. Instead of making individual lasers increasingly powerful and difficult to manufacture, we move that scaling challenge into the architecture.”

“Every new wave of compute creates new bottlenecks further down the supply chain, and lasers are the next one," said Ion Hauer, Investment Partner at APEX Ventures. "Photon Bridge is addressing this with a technology that combines deep photonics expertise with a credible path towards manufacturing at very large scale.”

“AI is turning lasers from a telecom component into a semiconductor-scale product,” said Cesare Maifredi, Partner at 360 Capital. “Once you start talking about millions of units a year, manufacturing yield becomes fundamental. Photon Bridge has designed its architecture from the beginning around the volumes this market is going to require.”

Photon Bridge develops advanced laser technology that helps AI data centres transfer data quickly between processors using light. Its technology is designed to support the growing computing needs of next-generation AI systems.

The company combines light from several smaller semiconductor lasers to produce stronger light signals at different wavelengths. This approach helps meet the high-speed data demands of large AI systems while supporting large-scale production through multiple indium phosphide (InP) manufacturing facilities.

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