Solinide raises €4M to commercialise photonic chip tech for data centres
Solinide Photonics, developer of silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits for optical interconnects, has closed its €4 million seed funding round from six financial and strategic investors. The raise represents an important milestone for Solinide and will enable the startup to commercialise its patented technology and prepare for scalable manufacturing.
The company’s ultra-efficient photonics chips and microcomb technology 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 the future generation of hardware while reducing the power, cost, and footprint of every optical link.
The investment is part of a €4 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 centres.
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.
A spin-out from Chalmers University of Technology, Solinide microcomb chip technology sits at the intersection of several of today’s most important technology trends: AI infrastructure, energy efficiency, semiconductors and photonics. Successful product industrialisation can benefit AI datacentre, telecommunications, and other key growth markets.
The funding will support Solinide as it moves simultaneously on technology readiness, commercialisation, and market adoption.
“Solinide has demonstrated that its microcomb technology can achieve the performance required for datacentre links and deliver an integrated rack-mounted product. A key priority now is preparing for commercial readiness, launch, and real-world deployment,” said Marcello Girardo, CEO, Solinide Photonics.
With much of the AI and datacentre photonics value chain currently concentrated in the US and Asia, technologies such as Solinide’s can strengthen Sweden’s and Europe’s capabilities in strategically important semiconductor and photonics applications.
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