This Dutch Startup Just Raised $11M to Fix AI's Laser Problem

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-21

Photon Bridge, a startup out of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, just closed a $11 million round. And no, this isn't another AI chatbot story. It's about the physical hardware that makes AI clusters actually work. The company (formerly known as Photon IP) builds optical engines — laser sources that connect massive clusters of AI processors. The fresh capital is meant to tackle a bottleneck most people never think about: producing the millions of lasers needed to link hundreds of thousands of chips together. ### Who's putting money in The Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital co-led the round. Existing backers Innovation Industries, Faber, and the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) all increased their stakes. That follows a $5.2 million seed round in January 2025, which Innovation Industries led. "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 suddenly matter for AI Here's the thing. As AI clusters grow from thousands of chips to hundreds of thousands, moving data between those processors becomes a real performance limit. Electrical interconnects start to struggle. Optical connections move far more data, faster and with less energy — which is why optics are creeping closer and closer to the chips themselves. Co-packaged optics is accelerating that shift, integrating optical connectivity right alongside the processors. And every one of those connections needs a laser to supply the light. > "Today's high-power laser supply chain was largely built for telecom and subsea networks, where volumes are far lower. AI could transform the laser from a specialist photonics component into something that has to be manufactured at semiconductor scale." That's the gap Photon Bridge is chasing. ### A different approach to scaling Instead of pushing a few lasers to ever-higher power — which makes them fragile and hard to manufacture — Photon Bridge combines and multiplexes light from many lower-power semiconductor lasers. - Lower power densities per laser - Less sensitivity to manufacturing defects - Better production yield as volumes climb - Up to 40 mW of optical power per wavelength per fiber - Production across multiple indium phosphide (InP) foundries The logic is simple once you see it: move the scaling challenge into the architecture, not into each individual laser. ### New name, new CEO, new chapter Photon Bridge was founded back in 2020 by Rui Santos and Xaveer Leijtens. In September 2025, the company rebranded from Photon IP and brought in Paul Marchal as CEO. "AI is fundamentally changing the way computing infrastructure is built," Marchal said. "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." He's got a point. The industry will soon need millions of these laser sources every year. Whether Photon Bridge can deliver them at that scale is the real test — and now it has the runway to try.