Scintil Photonics, a Grenoble-based startup building light-based components to enable AI chips to connect better and faster in data centres, has raised €50m in equity funding.
The Series B brings total funding raised by the company to €67.5m and was co-led by French VC Yotta Capital Partners, which focuses on industrial decarbonisation, together with US investor NGP Capital. Nvidia also participated in the round.
Scintil Photonics has built a chip that integrates a number of optical devices such as lasers to enable more efficient data transmission between graphics processing units (GPUs) — a type of chip used to train and run AI models, which are currently largely produced by Nvidia.
Data transmission is typically run through copper cables in data centres, but as AI models grow bigger the technology is reaching its limits.
“People are trying to go from 100k to millions of GPUs per data centre,” says Scintil Photonics CEO Matthew Crowley. “There’s no way to connect them to each other using old copper tech [...] Our tech is a must-have if you want to build a mega-scale data centre.”
Light-based data transfers
CTO Sylvie Menezo says Scintil Photonics’s light-based chip can significantly increase the rate and density of data transfers compared to copper while reducing energy consumption by a factor of five, significantly impacting the carbon footprint of data centres.
Until now the product has mostly been tested as a prototype with a handful of chip producers, including Nvidia. The fundraise will be used to ramp up manufacturing, and Menezo says the technology will rapidly reach high volumes because it is based on a silicon chip. “It can be produced leveraging the standard supply chain for semiconductors,” she says.
Crowley anticipates Silicon Photonics will deploy thousands of units next year and increase production until 2028, when it plans to reach “mass deployment” in large-scale data centres.
The startup has small revenues for now but with one part expected to cost several hundred dollars, building out a new data centre “could generate over $10m, even $100m if it’s big enough,” Crowley says.
To do this, the startup plans to expand its presence in North America, where it says most of its customers are located. It already has a subsidiary in Toronto and will soon open an office in the US, where it will hire for customer-facing roles.
Engineering functions will primarily remain in Grenoble, where Scintil Photonics will also expand its team. The company says it will double its global workforce to 80 employees in the coming years.
