Photon Bridge raises €10M to tackle AI’s laser bottleneck
Dutch photonics startup Photon Bridge has raised €10 million to tackle an emerging bottleneck in AI infrastructure: producing the millions of lasers that will be needed to connect increasingly large clusters of AI processors.
The round was co-led by new investors the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital, with existing investors Innovation Industries, Faber, and Brabant Development Agency (BOM) also increasing their investment.
Photon Bridge combines light from multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers to deliver the optical power and wavelength density required by increasingly large AI systems, while enabling high-volume manufacturing across multiple InP foundries.
The financing will allow Photon Bridge to accelerate product development and customer qualification, deliver its first samples in 2027, and prepare for volume manufacturing from 2028. The company will also expand its team in Eindhoven as it moves towards commercialisation.
More than 20 million data centre AI accelerators are forecast to ship annually by 2028, according to Omdia. As AI clusters grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands of processors, moving data between those chips is becoming one of the fundamental constraints on their performance.
Today’s high-power laser supply chain was largely built for telecom and subsea networks, where volumes are far lower. AI could transform the laser from a specialist photonics component into something that has to be manufactured at semiconductor scale.
Rather than generating the required optical power using a small number of increasingly powerful lasers, Photon Bridge combines and multiplexes light from multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers.
Lower power densities make individual lasers less sensitive to manufacturing defects, improving production yield and allowing Photon Bridge’s architecture to scale more efficiently as volumes increase. The platform is designed to deliver high wavelength counts with up to 40 mW of optical power per wavelength per fibre, while enabling production across multiple InP foundries.
“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.”
Photon Bridge’s approach is designed around manufacturing yield, which is a consideration that becomes increasingly important as laser production moves from traditional telecom volumes towards the scale required by AI infrastructure.
“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.”
