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11 Mar 2026
Santa Clara startup also launches eight-wavelength laser based on its proprietary frequency-comb approach.
Xscape Photonics, the California-based startup that has developed a novel laser architecture to improve optical interconnects, says it raised another $37 million.
Bringing the Santa Clara firm’s total series A fundraising to $81 million, the latest cash follows the $44 million announced in October 2024 and comes from a combination of new venture capital investor Addition, and existing backers including Nvidia.
Co-founded by former Broadcom executive Vivek Raghunathan and Columbia University professors Michal Lipson and Keren Bergman, among others, Xscape’s laser technology is based around optical frequency combs, and the idea that comb-driven dense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) within a silicon photonics platform can alleviate energy, bandwidth, and redundancy bottlenecks.
Eight-color laser
Alongside the capital raise, Xscape said it had launched a new eight-wavelength laser it calls “FalconX”. The device is described as the industry’s first fully redundant external laser small-form-factor pluggable (ELSFP) device capable of emitting that number of colors, and is aimed at applications in AI data centers.
However, Xscape thinks that the comb-driven approach - which it calls “ChromX” - can scale to many more wavelengths, and the team is targeting the emission of 16, 32 and, ultimately, 128 colors.
“Rapidly increasing bandwidth, power and cost demands of AI workloads have created a critical hardware bottleneck, forcing developers to use just a fraction of their GPUs' capacity, thereby limiting the revolutionary potential of AI itself,” explained Raghunathan.
“With the support of our world-class investors, Xscape Photonics is accelerating the development of its WDM fabric solutions to escape these hardware limits and fundamentally reimagine how data moves through data center networks.
“FalconX is the industry’s first Comb laser module in a pluggable form factor capable of generating eight wavelengths of light, powering high-speed data movement to allow the entire data center to function as one giant GPU.”
128-color roadmap
Addition’s founder Lee Fixel commented: “We see this as a compelling opportunity to invest in optical laser innovation at a moment when advanced photonics is becoming critical to AI infrastructure.
“With innovations like FalconX's eight-wavelength redundant laser and the ChromX roadmap to 128-plus colors, Xscape is addressing the bandwidth bottlenecks that constrain AI cluster performance today.”
While Xscape is now looking to sample the eight-color FalconX for both scale-up and scale-out links, the company’s engineers have already developed functional 16‑color CombX prototypes in collaboration with chip foundry partner Tower Semiconductor.
“With more than 1 W of optical power from a single pluggable laser module, FalconX generates eight colors which can power multi-terabits-per-second of data bandwidth,” Xscape says.
“AI clusters have grown more than ten-fold over the last two years, and the failure of a single laser module can significantly impact the network, stalling the workload and increasing the token cost.
“Hyperscalers demand ten times fewer failures compared to the incumbent laser level due to the growth of AI clusters. FalconX offers built-in redundancy and more reliable components to meet growing cluster demands.”
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