Salience Labs raises $125 million in Series B round led by Bullhound Capital

Oxford-based photonic chipmaker Salience Labs secured $125 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round on October 14, 2026, to scale manufacturing and expand its operations in the United States. Bullhound Capital led the investment, according to a company press release.

Bullhound Capital Principal Callum Stewart will join the Salience Labs board of directors following the transaction. The round included investments from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading, and the British Business Bank. Existing shareholders Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Silicon Catalyst Ventures also joined the round.

Scaling Optical Switching Technology

Salience Labs, led by chief executive officer and co-founder Vaysh Kewada, develops optical circuit switching technology and photonic chips designed for datacenter networking. The firm plans to use the new capital to scale high-volume manufacturing and expand its Silicon Valley office.

The company builds integrated switch architectures to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks in datacenters. Salience Labs previously held a live demonstration of a 64-port all-optical photonic switch at the ECOC 2026 conference, an event the company described as an industry first for silicon photonics optical circuit switching.

"OCS will play a critical role in AI datacenter networking," Kewada said in a press release. "As customers roll out optical links in their datacenters, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that workloads demand."

Industry Demand and Future Products

Patrick Rundell, director at AMD Ventures, said networking directly affects system performance as infrastructure design shifts toward rack-scale setups. "AI infrastructure is increasingly being designed at rack scale, where networking has a direct impact on system performance, efficiency and economics. Salience Labs is developing a differentiated, integrated optical switching architecture aimed at addressing these challenges, and AMD Ventures is pleased to support the team as it scales its technology and manufacturing capabilities," Rundell said.

Srini Ananth, managing director at Intel Capital, noted that optical switching provides gains in efficiency and speed. "Salience Labs stands out through its integrated silicon photonics architecture and proprietary optical amplification, addressing key challenges to deploying optical switching at scale," Ananth said.

Datacenter switch spending for back-end networks is expected to approach $1 trillion cumulatively between 2026 and 2030, according to forecasts from Dell'Oro Group. The research firm estimates that scale-up architectures will make up more than half of that market by 2030.

Salience Labs said it will next develop 128-port and 256-port optical circuit switches to support data-intensive compute environments.