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29 Jul 2025
Additional $6M to support production of hollow-core optical fiber for ultra-high-speed data center connections.
Relativity Networks, the central Florida startup working to bring the advantages of hollow-core optical fiber (HCF) to data center networking, says it has raised a further $6.1 million in seed funding.
Led by key partner - and major fiber producer - Prysmian, alongside GOVO Venture Partners, Prospective Advisors, Zendicate Ventures, and others, the latest round of support means that the firm’s total funding is now approaching $11 million since its 2023 founding by CEO Jason Eichenholz and the University of Central Florida (UCF) optics professor Rodrigo Amezcua Correa.
Latency advantage
In February Relativity announced its presence with a $4.6 million “pre-seed” funding round, and followed that up a month later with news of its Prysmian collaboration.
“This [latest] investment represents a pivotal milestone in Relativity Networks' mission to address two of the most urgent infrastructure challenges of the AI revolution - latency and access to power," said Eichenholz in a statement announcing the latest support.
“As data centers face unprecedented energy demands and latency requirements, our hollow-core fiber technology delivers the critical infrastructure backbone needed to support this exponential growth.
“This funding - along with our continued partnership with Prysmian - allows us to accelerate our ability to meet the surging demand for infrastructure that can handle AI's massive computational requirements.”
Relativity believes that its HCF will allow data center operators to overcome a bottleneck in the construction of new data centers, which typically need to be built within 60 km of power providers - or to one another - because of latency constraints.
The startup claims that its patent-pending HCF technology, developed at UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), extends that distance to 90 km, by taking advantage of the way that light propagates in an air core, transmitting data nearly 50 per cent faster than in a conventional silica glass fiber.
The higher bandwidth of HCF is also said to help reduce latency, and eliminate impacts on network performance.
Scaling HCF
Frederick Persson, Prysmian’s executive VP of digital solutions, said: “Hyperscalers are racing to meet the surging demands driven by AI, and we are proud to work with, and invest in, Relativity Networks to solve a critical challenge in this space.
“Our investment in Relativity is fully aligned with our leadership in digital solutions. Hollow-core fiber will be essential for building the digital infrastructure needed for the AI economy to flourish, and we're excited to strengthen our partnership with Relativity through this investment.
“Our work together plays an essential role in bringing hollow-core fiber to market at scale through our global co-manufacturing expertise.”
Posting on LinkedIn, Eichenholz added: “Pysmian’s investment in us builds on our existing work together. They started off as our cable manufacturing partner, which expanded into a formal, long-term partnership agreement for fibers and cables, to now investing in our larger vision.
“Our work together is focused on bringing Relativity Networks’ HCF to market at scale, serving our data center operators and hyperscaler customers.”
It’s not the first time that the advantages of HCF have been recognized by a key player in data center infrastructure.
Back in December 2022 Microsoft acquired the UK-based startup Lumenisity, which in 2017 was spun out of world-leading HCF research at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Center - the institution where Rodrigo Amezcua Correa completed his PhD.
As well as offering increased bandwidth and enhanced network quality the inner structure of HCF also enables higher security and intrusion detection, thanks to eliminating the nonlinear effects of conventional fiber.
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