Funding will support development of ultra-high-speed photonics chips for artificially intelligent (AI) applications

Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), the venture capital investor focused on deeptech and life science businesses in the Cambridge ecosystem, is pleased to announce it has co-led Salience Labs’ $11.5 million seed funding round, to support the company’s development of a new breed of ultra-high-speed multi-chip processor for AI applications.

Salience Labs was spun-out of the University of Oxford and the University of Münster in 2021 to commercialise an ultra high-speed multi-chip processor that packages a photonics chip together with standard electronics. The technology is highly scalable, capable of stacking up to 64 vectors into a beam of light. By using a broad bandwidth of light to execute operations, Salience Labs delivers massively parallel processing performance within a given power envelope.

Cambridge Innovation Capital co-led the seed round in partnership with Oxford Science Enterprises, Deeptech Labs, Oxford Investment Consultants and several individual investors.

Ian Lane, Partner, Cambridge Innovation Capital said

“Salience Labs brings together deep domain expertise in photonics, electronics, and CMOS manufacture. Their unique approach to photonics delivers an exceedingly dense computing chip without having to scale the photonics chip to large sizes.”

Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs said

“The world needs ever faster chips to grow AI capability, but the semiconductor industry cannot keep pace with this demand. We’re solving this with our proprietary ‘on-memory compute’ architecture which combines the ultra-fast speed of photonics, the flexibility of electronics and the manufacturability of CMOS. This will usher in a new era of processing, where supercompute AI becomes ubiquitous.”

Cambridge Innovation Capital co-led the seed round in partnership with Oxford Science Enterprises, Deeptech Labs, Oxford Investment Consultants and several individual investors.