Photon Bridge has raised €10 million to scale laser production for AI computing infrastructure.
360 Capital and the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund co-led the round. Existing backers Innovation Industries, Faber and Brabant Development Agency also increased their investment.
The Eindhoven-based photonics startup is targeting a supply constraint emerging as artificial intelligence systems grow larger and require more data to move between processors. Industry estimates cited by Photon Bridge suggest annual shipments of data-centre AI accelerators will exceed 20 million units by 2028, while demand for optical networking equipment is also rising sharply.
As AI clusters grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands of processors, the links between those chips are becoming a more significant design challenge. Optical connections are moving closer to the processors themselves, particularly through the development of co-packaged optics, which places optical connectivity alongside the chips that move data through AI systems.
That shift is increasing demand for lasers, which generate the light carried through optical links. Photon Bridge argues the current supply chain for high-power lasers was built mainly for telecoms and subsea networks, markets with lower unit volumes than those expected for AI infrastructure.
Instead of relying on a small number of more powerful lasers, the company combines and multiplexes light from multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers. It says this reduces sensitivity to manufacturing defects, improves yield and makes the design easier to scale across multiple indium phosphide foundries.
The platform is designed to provide high wavelength counts with up to 40 mW of optical power per wavelength per fibre. The approach is intended to support higher-volume production as optical interconnects move deeper into AI systems.
Chief Executive Officer Paul Marchal set out the company's view of the market shift.
"AI is fundamentally changing the way computing infrastructure is built," said Paul Marchal, Chief Executive Officer 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."
Investor view
Investors in the round framed the company's proposition around manufacturing scale as well as photonics design. They pointed to a shift in laser market economics as AI infrastructure moves from specialist deployments to higher-volume production.
"Every new wave of compute creates new bottlenecks further down the supply chain, and lasers are the next one," said APEX Ventures Investment Partner Ion Hauer. "Photon Bridge is addressing this with a technology that combines deep photonics expertise with a credible path towards manufacturing at very large scale."
Partner Cesare Maifredi of 360 Capital linked the investment to the expected increase in production volumes.
"AI is turning lasers from a telecom component into a semiconductor-scale product," said Maifredi. "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."
Next steps
The new funding will be used to advance product development, support customer qualification work and expand the company's team in Eindhoven. Photon Bridge plans to deliver its first samples in 2027 and move to volume manufacturing from 2028.
The company is positioning itself in a part of the AI hardware stack attracting growing attention as training and inference systems become larger and more densely connected. While much of the investment focus has centred on chips, servers and networking equipment, supporting components such as lasers are becoming more strategically important as optical links move closer to processors.
Photon Bridge develops multi-wavelength laser-source technology for optical interconnects used in AI data centres. Its manufacturing approach is based on using multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers and distributing production across more than one indium phosphide foundry, which the company says is better suited to the volume requirements of future AI systems.
The financing comes as investors across Europe continue to back deep-tech startups tied to AI infrastructure, especially companies working on hardware supply-chain bottlenecks rather than end-user applications. For Photon Bridge, the central claim is that laser yield and manufacturability may become as important as raw optical performance as the market scales towards millions of units a year.