About Salience Labs
Salience Labs builds all-optical switches for AI data centers, using silicon photonics so that traffic is steered as light without being converted to electrical signals and back. Conventional switches convert at every hop, which adds delay and power use. Its OC-32M module is a named product, and it has demonstrated a 64-port optical circuit switch. The company is led by founder and CEO Vaysh Kewada, with Johannes Feldmann as co-founder and CTO, and its press releases are datelined Oxford, England. Its performance figures for latency, power and cost are company claims.
Salience Labs was founded in 2021 and is based in Oxford, UK, United Kingdom. It is listed under Photonic Computing, AI Accelerators, Interconnect & Networking. Reported funding is $30M Series A (Feb 2025, led by ICM HPQC Fund and Applied Ventures).
Compute Technologies
- Photonic Computing
- AI Accelerators
What Salience Labs 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.
AI Accelerators
An AI accelerator is a chip, or a part of a chip, designed to run machine learning faster or with less energy than a general-purpose processor. The category includes GPUs, TPUs, neural processing units (NPUs) and chips from many startups.
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 Kingdom
Optalysys, Oriole Networks, Blueshift Memory, Alphawave Semi, RedWave Labs
