Photon Bridge Secures $11M to Solve AI's Looming Laser Shortage

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-21

Photon Bridge, a startup based in Eindhoven, just raised $11 million (€10 million) to tackle a problem most of us don't think about: the millions of lasers needed to connect AI processors. Because as AI clusters grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands of chips, moving data between them is becoming a real bottleneck. And that's where photonics comes in. ### The Funding Round The round was co-led by new investors Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital, with existing backers Innovation Industries, Faber, and Brabant Development Agency (BOM) increasing their stakes. This follows a $5.2 million (€4.75 million) seed round in January 2025 led by Innovation Industries. So yeah, investors are clearly betting on the laser problem. "Every new wave of compute creates new bottlenecks further down the supply chain, and lasers are the next one," said Ion Hauer, Investment Partner at APEX Ventures. "Photon Bridge is addressing this with a technology that combines deep photonics expertise with a credible path towards manufacturing at very large scale." ### Why Lasers Matter for AI Photon Bridge was founded in 2020 by Rui Santos and Xaveer Leijtens to rethink how high-performance photonic systems are built at scale. The company develops high-power, multi-wavelength laser sources for next-gen optical interconnects in AI data centers. The idea is simple: as AI clusters expand, electrical interconnects struggle to keep up. Optical connections can move massive amounts of data faster and more efficiently, so they're moving closer to the chips. That shift is accelerating with co-packaged optics, which integrate optical connectivity directly alongside the chips. And all of that drives demand for lasers. But here's the catch: today's high-power laser supply chain was built for telecom and subsea networks, where volumes are much lower. AI could transform the laser from a specialist component into something that needs to be manufactured at semiconductor scale. That means millions of units per year. ### A Different Approach to Scaling Instead of making individual lasers more powerful and harder to manufacture, Photon Bridge combines and multiplexes light from multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers. This reduces power densities, making each laser less sensitive to defects, which improves production yield. The platform delivers high wavelength counts with up to 40 mW of optical power per wavelength per fiber, and it's designed for production across multiple indium phosphide (InP) foundries. In September 2025, Photon IP rebranded as Photon Bridge and appointed Paul Marchal as CEO. Marchal summed up the challenge: "AI is fundamentally changing the way computing infrastructure is built. 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." So while the rest of us are marveling at AI's capabilities, Photon Bridge is quietly solving the hardware bottleneck that could otherwise hold it back. And with this fresh funding, they're one step closer to making lasers at the scale AI demands.