nEye.ai announced it has raised $80 million in a Series C funding round to accelerate the development and manufacturing of its optical circuit-switching technology for AI infrastructure.
The round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from existing investors including CapitalG, M12, and Socratic Partners. The financing brings nEye’s total funding to $152 million.
The company is focused on scaling its proprietary Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) technology, which enables flexible, high-performance data center architectures by dynamically pooling compute resources, such as CPUs, GPUs, and memory. The technology is designed to address increasing demands from large-scale AI workloads, where traditional networking approaches face limitations in power, latency, and scalability.
nEye’s platform integrates silicon photonics, MEMS, and CMOS into a single chip, delivering a compact and energy-efficient solution compared to conventional switching systems. This approach is intended to support the evolution of “AI factories” and composable infrastructure models in hyperscale data centers.
As part of the funding, Stefan Dyckerhoff of Sutter Hill Ventures will join the company’s board of directors.
The new capital will be used to expand high-volume manufacturing capabilities and meet performance requirements for deployment across next-generation AI data centers.
KEY QUOTES:
“The market for Optical Circuit Switching is projected to surpass $3 billion within the next three years. By moving away from complex mechanical assemblies to a foundry-compatible wafer-scale process, nEye is positioned to deliver the most cost-effective, high-performance switching solution for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across applications.”
Stefan Dyckerhoff, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
“Optical switching is now a requirement to unlock the true potential of AI training and inference at scale. We are doubling down on nEye because their ‘OCS-on-a-chip’ approach offers a unique path to meeting the extreme density and power constraints of modern hyperscale data centers.”
James Luo, General Partner, CapitalG
“While this milestone validates our technology, our focus now shifts to scaling our foundry-based manufacturing and meeting the rigorous performance standards our customers demand. The addition of Stefan and the team at Sutter Hill Ventures to our existing slate of strategic partners strengthens our ability to address all hyperscaler use-cases.”
Ashish Vengsarkar, Chief Executive Officer, nEye.ai
