Fast accelerators are useless if data crawls between them. iPronics, a Spanish startup attacking that bottleneck with programmable light, has raised $125M in a Series B co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital. NVIDIA joined the round along with Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, and the European Innovation Council Fund, pushing total funding to $177M.
The company builds silicon photonics switches that route data optically instead of electronically. Port counts run from 32 to 256 in the ONE family. Connections reconfigure in under a millisecond, with live optical telemetry feeding orchestration software. Clusters can rewire themselves on the fly when workloads change or GPUs fail.
That flexibility speaks to the physics of modern AI. Copper interconnects and electronic packet switches consume growing power and heat as bandwidth demands rise. Optical circuit switching promises direct light paths between endpoints, cutting the cost of moving data through giant training runs.
iPronics spent years getting from lab to factory. Born as a 2019 spin-off of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, it raised a €20M Series A in January 2025 and shipped the 32-port ONE-32 two months later. A Fabrinet production line opened in March 2026, with ten hyperscaler and AI-cluster OEM customers already in talks.
New capital expands manufacturing and adds a Santa Clara office near NVIDIA. Manish Muthal of Maverick Silicon and Geoffrey Tate, former Rambus CEO, join the board. Young Sohn of Catalight Capital, a former Samsung president, signs on as an adviser.
