Rockley Photonics wins $40m further funding

08 Mar 2018

Takes total funding raised to $100 million in five years to address “billion-dollar silicon photonics market opportunity”.

Rockley Photonics, a pioneer in integrated optics for high-density digital systems, this week announced that it has raised $40 million in its most recent funding round.

The company says this latest investment, which takes the startup’s total raised so far to $100 million since its 2013 launch, will enable Rockley “to rapidly expand the design and production of its platform for high-performance optical networking solutions, imaging and sensor photonics, and custom photonics for consumer applications”.

Rockley’s differentiated silicon manufacturing technology can produce optical devices, such as silicon photonics-based transceivers, at a competitive cost with relatively low power consumption.

The company’s new funding announcement states, “Rockley’s ability to integrate electronics and photonics without compromising manufacturability or performance enables us to serve numerous emerging applications”.

Rockley’s target markets include consumer electronics, autonomous vehicle, biomedical and industrial sectors, as well as high-performance networking optics for datacenter and infrastructure networking.

“The industry has responded strongly to our platform approach, especially given its flexibility to address a range of market applications,” said Dr. Andrew Rickman, chief executive officer, Rockley Photonics. “This round of funding will enable us to focus our technology on these emerging, high-growth market opportunities.”

’Accelerate market focus’

Rockley’s chief financial officer, Mahesh Karanth, commented, “This latest funding will accelerate our strategic market focus. We will deliver an IP portfolio that will enable customers to quickly deploy the Rockley platform across their multiple markets.”

“We are seeing rapidly emerging, high-growth market opportunities for our integrated photonics platform,” added Rockley’s chief commercial officer, Nick Kucharewski. “With active customer engagements in multiple high-growth segments, the new investment round will enable us to deliver advanced solutions for our customers.”

In January, Rockley announced a $42m joint venture with Hengtong Optic-Electric to manufacture high-performance optical transceiver modules based on its silicon photonics technology.