Eindhoven-based Photon Bridge raises €10 million to build optical engines for AI and telecom

Photon Bridge (formerly Photon IP), an Eindhoven-based startup building optical engines for AI and telecom, has raised €10 million to tackle an emerging bottleneck in AI infrastructure: producing the millions of lasers needed to connect increasingly large clusters of AI processors.

New investors, the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital, co-led the round, while existing investors Innovation Industries, Faber, and Brabant Development Agency (BOM) also increased their investment. In January 2025, the company announced it had secured a €4.75 million Seed round led by Innovation Industries. 

“Every new wave of compute creates new bottlenecks further down the supply chain, and lasers are the next one. Photon Bridge is addressing this with a technology that combines deep photonics expertise with a credible path towards manufacturing at very large scale,” said Ion Hauer, Investment Partner at APEX Ventures. 

Photon Bridge was founded in 2020 in Eindhoven by Rui Santos and Xaveer Leijtens to rethink how high-performance photonic systems are built at scale. The company says it is building laser sources for a market expected to need millions of units as optical connections move closer to AI chips.

It develops high-power, multi-wavelength laser-source technology for next-generation optical interconnects in AI data centres.

According to the startup, data transfer between processors is becoming a performance constraint as AI clusters expand from thousands to hundreds of thousands of chips. It notes that optical connections can move enormous amounts of data faster and more efficiently than conventional electrical interconnects, prompting their integration closer to processors. 

It also notes that this shift is accelerating with the emergence of co-packaged optics, which integrates optical connectivity directly alongside the chips that move data through AI systems. The startup says that this, in turn, drives demand for the lasers that supply light to these connections.

“Today’s high-power laser supply chain was largely built for telecom and subsea networks, where volumes are far lower. AI could transform the laser from a specialist photonics component into something that has to be manufactured at semiconductor scale. Photon Bridge has designed its technology around that transition,” the company mentioned in the press release 

Rather than generating the required optical power using a small number of increasingly powerful lasers, Photon Bridge claims that it combines and multiplexes light from multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers.

The Dutch startup says this approach reduces power densities, making individual lasers less sensitive to manufacturing defects, improving production yield and allowing Photon Bridge’s architecture to scale more efficiently as volumes increase.

The platform is designed to deliver high wavelength counts with up to 40 mW of optical power per wavelength per fibre, while enabling production across multiple indium phosphide (InP) foundries.

In September 2025, Photon IP rebranded as Photon Bridge and appointed Paul Marchal as CEO.

Marchal, CEO of Photon Bridge, said, “AI is fundamentally changing the way computing infrastructure is built. We are moving towards enormous systems in which hundreds of thousands of processors have to operate together, and moving data between them is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance.

“That means optics has to move closer to the compute. But it also creates an entirely different manufacturing challenge. The industry will soon need millions of these laser sources every year. Instead of making individual lasers increasingly powerful and difficult to manufacture, we move that scaling challenge into the architecture.”

Photon Bridge highlights that its approach is designed around manufacturing yield, a consideration that becomes increasingly important as laser production shifts from traditional telecom volumes to the scale required by AI infrastructure.

“AI is turning lasers from a telecom component into a semiconductor-scale product. Once you start talking about millions of units a year, manufacturing yield becomes fundamental. Photon Bridge has designed its architecture from the beginning around the volumes this market is going to require,” said Cesare Maifredi, Partner at 360 Capital.

The company plans to use this capital to accelerate product development and customer qualification, deliver its first samples in 2027, and prepare for volume manufacturing from 2028. Photon Bridge will also expand its Eindhoven team as it moves toward commercialisation. 

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