PIC developer Solinide Photonics closes €4 million seed funding

Solinide Photonics, developer of silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits for optical interconnects, has announced the closing of a seed funding round from six financial and strategic investors. The €4.0 million ($4.7 million) capital raised represents a broadening of the investor consortia for the seed stage and will enable Solinide to commercialize its patented technology and prepare for scalable manufacturing.

The company – a 2021 spin-out from Chalmers University of Technology – is developing what it calls “ultra-efficient photonics chips and microcomb technology” to address one of AI infrastructure’s biggest challenges; moving vast volumes of data between chips without a matching rise in power consumption.

Solinide’s multi-wavelength laser sources are designed to scale with future generations of hardware while reducing the power, cost and footprint of optical links.

The investment is part of a €4.0 million financing round, co-led by Navigare Ventures and PSV Hafnium, alongside  Chalmers Ventures,  Turbine Capital, Norrsken Evolve and Almi Greentech Fund.  The broadened seed-investor consortium brings deep expertise across industrial technology and company building, strengthening Solinide’s ability to move impactful technology into data centers.

Repacing lasers with a chip

In practical terms, Solinide replaces racks of individual lasers with a single chip that produces dozens of precise colours of light at once, so far, more data travels down each fibre for a fraction of the electricity.

Solinide’s funding announcement states that its microcomb chip technology “sits at the intersection of several of today’s most important technology trends: AI infrastructure, energy efficiency, semiconductors and photonics,” adding: “successful product industrialisation can benefit AI datacenter, telecommunications and other key growth markets.”

Marcello Girardi, CEO, commented, “Solinide has demonstrated that [our] microcomb technology can achieve the performance required for datacenter links and deliver an integrated rack-mounted product. A key priority now is preparing for commercial readiness, launch and real-world deployment with the aim of sharing product news very shortly.”

“The capital raise will support expansion of the engineering and commercial teams, strengthen Solinide’s in-house prototyping capabilities, manufacturing readiness in Europe and resources to deepen collaboration with strategic industry partners,” Girardi said.

Jakob Rybak-Andersen, Managing Partner at PSV Hafnium, said, “Solinide’s unique technologies and highly skilled team place the company in a strong position to excel in photonics technology development globally and achieve go-to-market success. Our focus is to support Solinide in bringing its groundbreaking technology to the global market which we will do together with our strong group of Nordic co-investors.” 

The Solinide statement concluded, “With much of the AI and datacenter photonics value chain currently concentrated in the US and Asia, technologies such as [ours] can strengthen Sweden’s and Europe’s capabilities in strategically important semiconductor and photonics applications.”