NcodiN has closed a €16 million Seed round to accelerate the industrialization of its photonic interposer platform built around what the company calls the world’s smallest laser. The Paris-based startup, founded in 2023, is developing optical interposer technology to break through the performance and efficiency ceiling of copper interconnects, which currently limit the scalability of advanced AI systems.
The oversubscribed round transitions NcodiN from a research phase into large-scale industrial development. Funding will support product development, engineering hires, expansion of its CMOS pilot line for 300 mm wafers, and strengthening of its supply chain and customer partnerships. The round was led by MIG Capital, with participation from Maverick Silicon, PhotonVentures, and Verve Ventures, as well as continued backing from Elaia, Earlybird, and OVNI.
The company’s technology centers on NConnect, a next-generation photonic interposer architecture created to overcome the performance limits caused by electrical interconnects. The core nanolaser enables dense photonic integration directly on silicon without requiring changes to existing processor designs. NcodiN believes this will allow manufacturers to integrate supercomputer-class performance into a single processor while improving energy efficiency and scalability. The new capital will enable the company to accelerate qualification of the platform and launch an industrial pilot demonstrating compatibility with advanced packaging.
NcodiN plans to expand its presence into Silicon Valley, scale its engineering team, and broaden its R&D capabilities to prepare for high-volume manufacturing partnerships. According to the company, the objective is to provide the optical foundation needed to support wafer-scale superchips and next-generation AI accelerators.
Over the past 18 months, the company has demonstrated nanolasers with energy efficiency below 0.1 pJ per bit, integrated nanodetectors, and complete optical links fabricated on silicon. NcodiN has also established an independent cleanroom that serves as a rapid-prototyping and joint-development hub for industry partners. The company continues to build out its advisory network, adding leading experts including Eli Yablonovitch, Gus Yeung, and Peter de Dobbelaere.
NcodiN’s leadership, investors, and advisors describe the company as positioned at the center of a significant shift in AI hardware, driven by the need for dramatically higher memory bandwidth, more efficient interconnects, and scalable architectures that can keep pace with accelerating generative AI workloads. Funding from MIG Capital, Maverick Silicon, and existing investors reflects the growing urgency across the semiconductor and AI ecosystems to find alternatives to copper solutions that struggle to meet modern performance requirements.
Founded as a CNRS spin-off, the company aims to enable what it calls a “more-than-copper” era, in which optical interposers replace traditional electrical interconnects to unlock new levels of system performance, energy efficiency, and scalability. The company expects the Seed round to position it for significant industrial milestones and deeper integration within the global AI hardware supply chain.
KEY QUOTES
“This funding marks a pivotal milestone for NcodiN. We are delivering the missing piece for the industry’s most pressing challenge: enabling extremely high memory bandwidth to power the AI factories of tomorrow. Our technology unlocks wafer-scale superchips by providing the most energy-efficient interconnects for networking across tens of chiplets – an essential component in the architectures everyone is chasing. As new generations of GPUs and AI accelerators emerge to keep pace with rapidly evolving GenAI algorithms, NcodiN is laying the photonic foundation that makes them possible.”
Francesco Manegatti, CEO and Co-founder, NcodiN
“Memory bandwidth has become a defining bottleneck in AI, with copper interconnects struggling to deliver the reach and efficiency required for next-generation systems. NcodiN’s photonic interposers unlock memory bandwidth and capacity beyond copper’s limits. We are excited to support NcodiN as they enable architectures that will define the future of AI hardware.”
Josh Miner, Maverick Silicon
“NcodiN is addressing the next big opportunity in Silicon Photonics, the Silicon Photonic Interposer, which permits high-bandwidth communication in a multi-chip system, particularly for AI and Machine Learning. To do this, they embed high-performance nanolasers in silicon, thereby combining physics elegance with manufacturability. This has the likelihood of revolutionizing all future large scale cyber systems.”
Eli Yablonovitch, Professor in the Graduate School, UC Berkeley
“NcodiN is working at the center of the AI infrastructure market, a sector experiencing rapid, significant growth driven by the surging demand for generative AI, the proliferation of big data, advancements in specialized hardware like GPUs, and the widespread adoption of cloud computing. The company’s ambitious team is shaping and empowering the future of computing to drive innovation across multiple industries. We couldn’t be happier to support them.”
Dr. Oliver Kahl, Principal, MIG Capital
“At Elaia, we’ve been proud backers of NcodiN since it’s early days when it was a CNRS spin-off. While copper interconnects struggle to keep up, NcodiN is rewriting the rules with the world’s smallest laser and a revolutionary optical network. This isn’t just innovation; it’s the key to unlocking the next leap in AI and hyperscale performance. Looking forward for the next milestones of the company!”
Clément Vanden Driessche, Partner, Elaia
