Company secures funds, targets data center interconnect market
OpenLight, a designer of custom application-specific photonic chips, has secured $34 million in funding.
The Series A funding round was co-led by Xora Innovation and Capricorn Investment Group. Other participants include Mayfield; HPE’s Juniper Networks; Lam Capital, the corporate venture arm of Lam Research Corporation; New Legacy Ventures; and K2 Access.
OpenLight offers design and manufacturing services around Photonic Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (PASIC) chips – which it claims are the photonic equivalent of traditional ASICs. Its Process Design Kit (PDK), based on the integration of indium phosphide and silicon photonics, gives customers access to a library of optical components covering integrated lasers, modulators, amplifiers, and detectors that can be integrated on one chip. One of the use cases the company is targeting is data center interconnect.
“As we enter this next phase of our company’s growth, we are excited to be adding such strong investors with deep roots and expertise in the semiconductor and photonics industry,” said Dr. Adam Carter, CEO of OpenLight. “With this strong syndicate of investors, we can push the boundaries of innovation and deliver transformative solutions to our customers. This funding will allow us to scale our operations, deepen our R&D efforts, and bring our groundbreaking products to market faster. We believe heterogeneous integrated silicon photonics will transform the way data is processed and transmitted, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of this revolution.”
With the new funding, the company aims to expand its library of photonics components and ramp up its standard-based reference PICs at 1.6Tb/s and 3.2Tb/s to “provide customers with the most flexible and leading-edge component design library available in the market.”
OpenLight’s history goes back to 2008. Its core integrated silicon photonics platform technology was developed at Aurrion, a University of California, Santa Barbara spin-out. Aurrion was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2016, before being reformed as OpenLight in 2022 and securing funding from Juniper and Synopsys.
“Xora has conviction that the field of photonics is going to see exponential growth in the coming years, and III-V heterogeneous integration is one of the foundational capabilities that will enable this growth,” said Phil Inagaki, managing partner & chief investment officer, Xora. “We see OpenLight not only as a technology leader in this field, but also as a company positioned to quickly scale manufacturing with foundry partners. One of the critical challenges for the photonics industry in the back half of this decade will be achieving scale, and we see OpenLight’s PDK as an important part of the solution.”
OpenLight operates an open foundry model, licensing its component library and technology to semiconductor foundries.
