About OpenLight
OpenLight, based in Santa Barbara, California, offers a silicon photonics platform with lasers built into the chip. Silicon cannot easily emit light, so most designs attach separate laser parts. OpenLight instead bonds indium phosphide material onto silicon wafers, allowing lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors on one chip. Customers design with its process design kit, and it is validated at the foundry Tower Semiconductor. The technology traces to Aurrion, a UC Santa Barbara spinout that Juniper Networks bought in 2016. OpenLight targets 800G and 1.6T links for AI data centers.
OpenLight was founded in 2022 and is based in Santa Barbara, CA, United States. It is listed under Photonic Computing, Interconnect & Networking. Reported funding is $50M Series A-1 extension (Apr 2026, total $84M).
Compute Technologies
- Photonics
What OpenLight works on
Photonic Computing
Photonic computing uses light instead of electricity to carry or process information. Photons have no charge, so light in a waveguide does not cause the resistive heating that current in a wire does, though lasers and modulators still use power, and many wavelengths can share one waveguide. The industry has two quite different parts: moving data with light, and computing with light.
Interconnect & Networking
Interconnect is the set of links that move data between chips, between boards and between racks. It includes wires on a package, cables inside a server, and the network switches and optical fibre across a data center. A processor is only as useful as the speed at which it can get data in and out.
Also in United States
Celestial AI, Lightwave Logic, Lumentum, GlobalFoundries, Applied Optoelectronics
