Photonics VC Update is a monthly series to brief scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders about the venture funding of emerging companies in various photonics technologies.
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The familiar themes of quantum computing and datacenter optical interconnect fabrics dominated venture capital deals in February 2025, but other interesting deals leveraging photonics for testing and metrology emerged.
In quantum computing, QuEra Computing (Boston, MA) announced a $230M convertible note that will be converted into equity when the company raises its next equity round. Google, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and Valor Equity Partners—along with all other major existing investors— participated. The company, a Harvard and MIT spinout that makes neutral atom-based quantum computers using laser cooling, had originally announced Google’s investment in October but not released any details about the total investment.
The interconnect venture deals were headlined by a pair of companies focused on optical switching for AI datacenters, a hot area for startup activity. Lumotive (San Jose, CA) raised a $45M Series B round with new investors Swisscom Ventures and East Bridge, as well as existing investors such as Gates Frontier and MetaVC Partners. The company has software-defined photonic beamforming technology applicable to 3D sensing, but wants to leverage the technology for optical switching for datacenters.
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Similarly, Salience Labs (Oxford, U.K.) announced a $30M Series A round led by ICM HPQC Fund and Applied Ventures, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials (Santa Clara, CA), to advance its optical switch technology and enable new interconnect network architectures for AI clusters.
Hyperlume (Ottawa, ON, Canada), a startup proposing high-bandwidth and low-power interconnects based on microLEDs for high-performance computing and AI infrastructure, raised a $12.5M seed round led by BDC’s Deep Tech Venture Fund and ArcTern Ventures.
Finally, Relativity Networks, based in Florida and led by former Luminar Technologies co-founder Jason Eichenholz, is working to solve the power scaling problem in datacenters by focusing on the fiber itself and announced a $4.6M pre-seed round to advance hollow-core fiber technology developed at the University of Central Florida.
As mentioned, there were also two venture deals supporting companies that are leveraging photonics in an interesting way to make critical measurements. Spore.Bio (Paris, France) is developing devices that use advanced machine learning and optical methods to identify harmful bacteria onsite within seconds, which helps manufacturers ensure product safety. The company raised a $23M Series A round led by Singular, with several additional funds participating—including Point 72 Ventures and 1st Kind Ventures.
Lastly, Wooptix (Madrid, Spain), a company developing semiconductor metrology equipment based on wavefront phase imaging technology, announced a €10M Series C round led by Samsung Ventures and Spanish Society for Technological Transformation, with participation from existing investors.
Eric Hall
Eric Hall is a managing partner of Entrada Ventures, a seed-stage fund investing in innovative technologies. He has worked alongside multiple Nobel Prize winners in building successful startups across various photonics technologies, including Aurrion (silicon photonics), Soraa (GaN LEDs), Kaai (GaN lasers), and Agility Communications (InP photonics), leading to multiple acquisitions. Subsequently, Hall led several transactions as an investment banker at Golding Partners before moving into early-stage investing. He earned his Bachelor of Science in engineering physics at UC Berkeley, a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Columbia Business School, and a PhD in materials at UC Santa Barbara.