Salience Labs

Salience Labs is a deep-tech company based in Oxford, UK, with a presence in San Jose, California. It develops all-optical circuit switches built on silicon photonics, designed to remove data-movement bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. The technology is the product of more than a decade of research at the University of Oxford and the University of Münster.

The company's fully integrated optical circuit switches dispense with the optical transceivers required by conventional electrical switches. Reported performance figures include switching in 10 nanoseconds, up to 20x lower network latency, and up to 8x lower power consumption per port relative to conventional approaches - matters of consequence for the cost and energy profile of large AI datacentres.

Salience Labs raised a $125m Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with strategic investment from AMD Ventures and Intel Capital. The team spans silicon photonics, digital electronics, embedded software and machine learning, and the company is scaling high-volume manufacturing as it expands in Silicon Valley.

Work spans several disciplines, including silicon photonics, optical networking, all-optical circuit switching, digital electronics, embedded software and machine learning, serving the semiconductor and AI datacentre infrastructure markets.