News: Optoelectronics
27 August 2025
OpenLight raises $34m in Series A funding round to scale integrated photonics for AI data centers
Photonic application-specific integrated circuit (PASIC) chip designer and manufacturer OpenLight of Santa Barbara, CA, USA (which launched as an independent company in June 2022, introducing the first open silicon photonics platform with heterogeneously integrated III-V lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors) has closed its oversubscribed $34m Series A fundraising round, which was co-led by Xora Innovation and Capricorn Investment Group. Other participants include Mayfield; Juniper Networks (now part of HPE); Lam Capital (the corporate venture arm of Lam Research Corp); New Legacy Ventures; and K2 Access.
This round of financing completes OpenLight's transition from a Synopsys subsidiary to a venture-backed company positioned to address the growing demand for faster and more energy-efficient data movement in AI data-center networks. As the shift from electrical to optical interconnects accelerates to support AI-scale workloads, integrated photonics is emerging as a core enabler of next-generation data-center infrastructure. Additional applications for OpenLight's technology include telecom, automotive and industrial sensing, IoT sensing, healthcare and quantum computing.
OpenLight says that its process design kit (PDK), based on the heterogeneous integration of indium phosphide and silicon photonics, gives customers access to a library of passive and active components spanning integrated lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors. The PDK has been validated at leading photonics foundry Tower Semiconductor, ensuring that designs are production-ready from day one. This enables customers to create custom PASICs using proven building blocks, simplifying advanced chip development and accelerating time-to-market. OpenLight currently holds more than 360 patents covering its PDK and the manufacturing of heterogeneously integrated III-V photonics. The OpenLight PDK is already being used by over 20 companies to design and fabricate PASICs across a wide spectrum of applications.
With the new capital injection, OpenLight will expand its PDK library of active and passive photonics components, including its leading-edge 400Gb/s modulator and indium phosphide heterogeneously integrated on-chip laser technology. OpenLight will also ramp up its standard-based reference PICs at 1.6Tb/s and 3.2Tb/s to provide customers with what is claimed to be the most flexible and leading-edge component design library available in the market. In addition, the firm will scale its team to support customers as they transition to volume production over the next 12 months.
“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,” comments chief technology officer Dr Adam Carter. “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,” he adds.
“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,” reckons Xora managing partner & chief investment officer Phil Inagaki. “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,” he adds.
“Optical connectivity in data centers has become critical for next-generation scale-up and scale-out AI architectures. OpenLight's heterogeneous integration delivers on all three axes of performance, reliability and cost, which will enable the explosive growth of optical IO,” reckons Dipender Saluja, managing partner at Capricorn’s Technology Impact Funds.
OpenLight partners with TFC to fast-track silicon photonics back-end process
OpenLight completes Telcordia GR-468 qualification for silicon photonics components
