Bullhound Capital leads Salience Labs’ $125 million Series B to scale photonic networking chips for AI datacenter infrastructure     

Salience Labs, a leader in photonic chips targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure, today announced the successful completion of an oversubscribed $125 million Series B funding round. The round is led by Bullhound Capital with Callum Stewart joining the Salience Labs Board of Directors. Additional investor participation came from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank, as well as continued support from existing shareholders including Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.

With this new funding, Salience Labs will accelerate the deployment of its optical circuit switching (OCS) technology, scale its volume manufacturing operations and expand its U.S. presence in Silicon Valley as the company continues to transform the networking layer of datacenter infrastructure.

This investment into Salience Labs marks Bullhound Capital’s continued thesis of identifying core bottlenecks to the deployment of AI. Specifically, for Salience Labs, our belief is that copper has reached its limit and the network is becoming the limiting factor in pushing forward datacenter performance. Thus, as we optics moves closer to the rack, Salience Lab’s will play a pivotal role in ensuring connectivity and switching capability is maintained.

“OCS will play a critical role in AI datacenter networking,” said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs. “As customers roll out optical links in their datacenters, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that workloads demand. Salience Labs has demonstrated a market-leading technology: a fully integrated on-chip solution that scales well to high-volume manufacturing. This funding will accelerate our growth into high-volume production to enable world-leading performance in AI datacenters.”  

Salience Labs’ all-optical, fully integrated switch architecture is purpose-built to be deployed at scale to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks for optimal scale-up network performance in AI datacenters.

“The investor base and customer relationships Salience Labs has developed really speaks to the capability of the leadership: Vaysh has assembled a strong team fully focused on designing a switch architecture that both aligns with customers’ near-term roadmaps but also scales with them far into the future. Bullhound Capital is proud to back this transformational company that is bringing to reality the next generation of high-performance data centers,” said Bullhound Capital Principal Callum Stewart.

The financing comes on the heels of Salience Labs’ live demo of its 64-port all-optical photonic switch at ECOC 2026, an industry first for silicon photonics OCS. The funding will enable future solutions including 128- and 256- port OCS, unlocking new use cases across data-intensive and performance-critical environments. Salience Labs is well positioned to expand and further develop its circuit switch technology, enabling the extension of scale-up and scale-out networks across the datacenter and realizing the true potential of AI.

About Salience Labs
Salience Labs is a leader in photonic solutions targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure. Founded in 2021 and backed by over a decade of research from the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Münster in Germany, Salience’s innovative developments in photonic switching technology enable high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads. Learn more at www.saliencelabs.ai

About Bullhound Capital
Bullhound Capital is the investment management arm of GP Bullhound, building with founders creating category-leading technology companies. With over €1 billion under management and 25 years of performance, it has invested in global leaders like Spotify, Klarna, Revolut, Slack, Unity, ConnexAI and EcoVadis. Operating from 13 offices worldwide, its platform delivers hands-on, founder-focused support across strategy, growth, and execution. From quantum to entertainment, Bullhound Capital backs global leaders applying Artificial Intelligence to solve real-world problems.

Enquiries
For press inquiries, contact: callum.stewart@bullhound.com.