iPronics has raised $125 million in Series B funding to scale its programmable optical networking technology for AI data centers. The round was co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with NVIDIA also participating. Other investors included Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund, The Tate Family Trust, Fine Structure Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Build Collective and Criteria Venture Tech. The financing brings iPronics’ total funding to $177 million.
Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from Universitat Politècnica de València, iPronics develops silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching technology designed for AI infrastructure.
The company plans to use the new capital to scale operations, accelerate commercial deployment and meet demand for its iPronics Optical Networking Engine, or ONE, a rack-mounted optical switch built for AI workloads.
iPronics ONE provides a programmable optical layer with integrated control, telemetry and APIs that allows AI clusters to reconfigure connectivity in real time for training and inference workloads.
The company is targeting a growing need for higher-density optical networking as AI clusters increase in size and traditional copper-based interconnects face growing bandwidth, power and thermal constraints.
iPronics said its optical circuit switching architecture can help hyperscalers increase GPU utilization while managing network cost, energy consumption and infrastructure complexity.
As part of the financing, Manish Muthal, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Silicon, has joined the iPronics board, along with Geoffrey Tate, an advisor to Light Street Capital.
Tate previously served as Senior Vice President of Microprocessors at AMD, was the founding CEO of Rambus and later co-founded and led Flex Logix before its acquisition by Analog Devices. He also serves on the board of Ayar Labs.
Young Sohn of Catalight Capital has also become an advisor to iPronics. Sohn previously served as Corporate President and Chief Strategy Officer at Samsung and CEO of Inphi and currently serves on the boards of Arm and Cadence Design Systems.
iPronics is also strengthening its U.S. operations with a new office in Santa Clara, California, where it is hiring across product strategy, customer deployments and AI infrastructure partnerships.
KEY QUOTES:
“Securing this support from Maverick Silicon, Light Street Capital and NVIDIA strengthens our vision as we build iPronics into a new class of optical networking leaders. With this investment, we can significantly accelerate our commercialization, delivering the scale our customers need to drive broad adoption and ensuring data centers can fully utilize their GPUs without compromising performance.”
Christian Dupont, CEO of iPronics
“The explosive growth of AI workloads has pushed traditional network infrastructure to its power and bandwidth limits, making optical circuit switching more critical than ever. We’re proud to co-lead this round and partner with the iPronics team, as they expand commercial deployments worldwide.”
Manish Muthal, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Silicon
“Light Street is excited to co-lead this Series B. We believe iPronics offers the most scalable and cost-effective approach to solid-state optical switching at the interconnect layer, a critical requirement for meeting AI compute demand over the next decade.”
Shef Osborn, Partner at Light Street Capital
“Next-generation AI infrastructure will require a more dynamic, optical-first network fabric. iPronics’ approach to programmable optical switching can help data centers scale performance while managing power and cost. I am honored to support the company as it accelerates commercialization.”
Young Sohn, Founding Member of Catalight Capital
“This Series B is a testament to our team’s relentless execution. Together with our tier-one partners we are successfully demonstrating that we can build and deploy this technology at scale for AI infrastructure.”
Dr. Daniel Pérez-López, Founder and CTO of iPronics
