Aylight announced that it has raised €4.5 million in pre-seed funding. The company is developing laser technology designed to address the optical bottleneck created by the rapid scaling of AI infrastructure. The round was co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures. Verve Ventures and Plug and Play also participated in the financing.
Aylight is focused on one of the increasingly important infrastructure challenges behind AI systems: moving data between chips efficiently. As AI models and workloads continue to grow, performance constraints are shifting from raw compute capacity toward the speed, cost, and energy efficiency of data movement.
Optical links are becoming a critical part of this challenge. But today, each optical link typically requires its own laser, creating complexity as AI systems demand more parallel data transfer between chips and across infrastructure.
Aylight is taking a different approach by developing a chip that emits a frequency-modulated comb. This technology can deliver many precisely spaced wavelengths from a single device, creating the parallelism that currently requires dozens of separate lasers.
The company’s approach is intended to reduce the complexity of optical connectivity for advanced AI systems. By enabling multiple wavelengths from one device, Aylight aims to support higher-capacity data movement while simplifying the underlying photonics architecture.
Another key part of Aylight’s strategy is manufacturability. The company said its technology is built on a standard semiconductor platform, which means it is designed to be produced through existing photonics foundries rather than requiring entirely new manufacturing infrastructure.
This could help Aylight move from research into scalable commercialization more efficiently. Existing foundry compatibility may also support faster prototyping, lower production barriers, and a clearer path toward integration into future AI hardware systems.
The new funding will help Aylight advance its technology from a research result to its first foundry-made prototypes. The company also plans to use the capital to expand its team as it builds toward the next phase of product development.
The financing comes as AI infrastructure companies, semiconductor firms, cloud providers, and data center operators look for new ways to improve the movement of data across increasingly dense computing systems. As more AI workloads depend on high-bandwidth, low-latency connections, optical technologies are expected to play a growing role in next-generation system design.
Aylight’s platform is positioned around this shift. The company is working to reinvent the laser layer behind AI infrastructure by making optical parallelism more compact, manufacturable, and scalable.
The round gives Aylight the resources to begin turning its technical concept into early hardware prototypes. If successful, the company’s technology could help address one of the key bottlenecks limiting the next phase of AI system performance.
