Swiss Photonic Chip Developer Aylight Secures €4.5 Million in Pre-Seed Funding

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Swiss photonic chip developer Aylight has raised €4.5 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the development of chip-scale multi-wavelength lasers, addressing one of the key bottlenecks limiting AI scaling.

The round was co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures, with participation from Verve Ventures and Plug and Play. The funds will be used to transition Aylight's lasers from research results to initial prototypes and production at semiconductor foundries. Additionally, Aylight will leverage the capital to expand its R&D team.

In March 2026, Nvidia committed $4 billion to Coherent and Lumentum to secure the supply of advanced lasers and optical interconnects needed for AI data centers. This investment publicly signaled that data transfer between chips, rather than raw computation, is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for AI infrastructure scaling. Currently, each optical link requires a separate laser, an approach that cannot achieve the throughput required by data centers.

"We started with a problem, not a technology: lasers have become a real limitation for AI scaling," said Bahareh Marzban, co-founder and CEO of Aylight. "What convinced me was seeing a technology initially demonstrated for a completely different application and realizing it was the answer—so we transformed it into a new type of laser designed specifically for AI data centers." Marzban added, "By rethinking the light source itself, we unlock unprecedented performance, from individual devices to entire systems. This is a foundation the entire industry can rely on, and we've already seen strong customer interest. This funding will allow us to launch our first products."

Aylight does not offer more of the same types of lasers but changes the functionality of individual lasers. Its chip emits an optical frequency comb, instantly generating multiple precisely spaced wavelengths, enabling a single device to provide the parallelism that previously required dozens of discrete lasers. The underlying architecture is a frequency-modulated comb (FM comb), built on a standard semiconductor laser platform and manufacturable in existing photonic foundries.

Aylight originated from research at ETH Zürich and a photonics conference in late 2024. At the conference, Bahareh Marzban presented a novel laser concept, and Dmitry Kazakov, based on his doctoral research, recognized its potential; the two co-founded the company in 2025.