Since its launch in 2022, the company has raised $57 million and the financing of the latest round was led by IAG Capital Partners with investment from Altair, Cisco Investments, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, NVIDIA and OUP.
Xscape Photonics said that the new funding will be used to accelerate the development of its ChromX platform, a scalable, programmable photonics platform for AI data centre fabrics.
“Historically, performance and scalability challenges have been addressed by building bigger data centres to train large language models. This approach is not sustainable and unlocks a myriad of additional issues around energy consumption and cost,” said Vivek Raghunathan, Co-Founder and CEO of Xscape Photonics. “At Xscape Photonics, we are on a mission to help our customers completely reimagine how they solve these challenges. This funding validates our mission and positions us for future growth to support next-generation AI data centres.”
According to a report by IDC, AI-driven workloads will account for over 20% of the energy consumption in large-scale data centres by 2025, especially as AI training becomes more common. With this growth occurring at such a rapid rate, AI data centes are likely to struggle to meet the energy efficiency, performance and scalability requirements needed to support the developments in AI.
“The performance scaling challenges are centred on the fundamental problem of “escape bandwidth” that results in a key bottleneck for AI workloads,” said Keren Bergman, Co-Founder of Xscape Photonics.
"We see tremendous value in the technology that Xscape Photonics is developing to solve challenges customers are facing with AI data centre energy usage and bandwidth performance,” said Alex Kash, Associate at IAG Capital Partners. “The future of the data centre will be built around photonics and this capital will help to dramatically accelerate Xscape Photonics’ product development.”
Data centres have traditionally been constrained to transmit data streams over four colours on a single fibre. However, as bandwidth demand has grown, the need for a scalable laser and photonics platform is becoming more essential as vendors are unable to keep up with the surge in volume demand for lasers in these networks.
Xscape Photonics’ multi-wavelength photonics platform can handle hundreds of colours on a single fibre, providing flexibility and efficiency for AI workloads. With its ChromX platform, Xscape Photonics is enabling hyperscale customers to reimagine the data centre fabric by utilising a scalable solution that can, according to the company, hit volume, cost and density targets.
“We are excited about accelerating commercialisation of our unique multi-colour laser photonics technology, for different custom use cases in the AI and hyperscaler markets,” said Alexander Gaeta, Co-Founder and President of Xscape Photonics.
