iPronics raises $125 M to scale optical networking for AI data centers

iPronics, a developer silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching for AI infrastructure, based in Valencia , Spain, has announced $125 million in Series B funding co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital. NVIDIA joined the round, with participation from other investors . The latest Series B tranche brings the company’s total funding to $177 million.

“Securing this support from Maverick Silicon, Light Street Capital and NVIDIA strengthens our vision as we build iPronics into a new class of optical networking leaders,” said Christian Dupont, CEO of iPronics. “With this investment, we can significantly accelerate our commercialization, delivering the scale our customers need to drive broad adoption and ensuring data centers can fully utilize their GPUs without compromising performance.”

The adoption of optical circuit switching (OCS) is accelerating across AI data center networks, says iPronics, with deployments across a range of connectivity applications. As AI clusters grow, the demands of scale-up networking are accelerating the transition from copper to optics and creating the need for a new generation of high-density scale-up switching solutions.

Built on silicon photonics, iPronics has developed a compact, purpose-built OCS platform designed to address the connectivity requirements of AI infrastructure, helping hyperscalers expand AI capacity while managing cost, power and complexity.

AI workload ‘explosion’

“The explosive growth of AI workloads has pushed traditional network infrastructure to its power and bandwidth limits, making optical circuit switching more critical than ever,” said Manish Muthal, senior managing director at Maverick Silicon. “We’re proud to co-lead this round and partner with the iPronics team, as they expand commercial deployments worldwide.”

Muthal joins the iPronics board of directors, along with Geoffrey Tate, an advisor to Light Street Capital. Tate brings decades of technology leadership, first as Senior VP of Microprocessors at AMD. He was also the founding CEO of Rambus, which he led for over a decade and took public, and most recently served as co-founder and CEO of Flex Logix, an AI inference acceleration hardware company that was acquired by Analog Devices. Tate serves on the board of Ayar Labs.

Shef Osborn, partner at Light Street Capital, said, “We believe iPronics offers the most scalable and cost-effective approach to solid-state optical switching at the interconnect layer, a critical requirement for meeting AI compute demand over the next decade.”

Additionally, Young Sohn of Catalight Capital, which manages a dedicated fund focused on AI infrastructure, becomes an advisor to the company. Sohn, a founding member of Catalight Capital, brings decades of semiconductor and silicon photonics leadership and experience scaling global technology platforms. He previously served as Corporate President and Chief Strategy Officer at Samsung, CEO of Inphi, and serves on the boards of Arm and Cadence Design Systems.

“Next-generation AI infrastructure will require a more dynamic, optical-first network fabric,” said Sohn. “iPronics’ approach to programmable optical switching can help data centers scale performance while managing power and cost. I am honored to support the company as it accelerates commercialization.”

Accelerating commercialization

The company will use the funds to significantly scale its operations, accelerate commercial deployment, and meet increasing market demand for its iPronics Optical Networking Engine (ONE), a rack-mounted optical switch built for AI. With integrated control, telemetry, and APIs, iPronics ONE provides a programmable optical layer that enables AI clusters to reconfigure connectivity in real time for training and inference workloads.

Dr. Daniel Pérez-López, founder and CTO, iPronics, said, “Together with our tier-one partners we are successfully demonstrating that we can build and deploy this technology at scale for AI infrastructure.”

To strengthen its U.S. presence, iPronics has opened an office in Santa Clara, California, and is actively hiring to bolster its product strategy, customer deployments, and AI infrastructure partnerships.