Salience Labs raises $125m Series B led by Bullhound Capital for optical switching

Salience Labs raised $125 million in a Series B round led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures and Intel Capital among the participants, Data Center Dynamics reported.

SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and British Business Bank joined the round alongside existing investors Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures. Hudson River Trading signed a multi-billion-dollar AI cloud agreement with CoreWeave in August, which PID reported.

The Oxford-based company, founded in 2021, says the money will accelerate deployment of its optical circuit switching hardware, scale volume manufacturing and expand its US presence in Silicon Valley.

Salience debuted a 32-port all-optical switch in March 2026 and followed with a 64-port version in September, which the coverage describes as an industry first for silicon photonics OCS technology. Configurations of 128 and 256 ports are the stated next step.

“There is a fundamental network limitation on the size of the scale-up domain,” co-founder and CEO Vaysh Kewada told SDxCentral, Data Center Dynamics' sister publication, ahead of the formal announcement of the raise. Customers, he said, “really need to get a good bang for the buck out of this expensive capex,” where “what matters is utilization and latency.”

The round lands in a run of optical interconnect financings. CScale exited stealth on 30 September with a $145 million Series C that also counted Intel Capital as a backer, and PicoJool raised $27.5 million on 28 September to scale VCSELs for AI links.