iPronics

Photonics · AI Infrastructure · Data Center Networking

Funding

iPronics raises $125M Series B, Nvidia joins for AI data center optics

Interconnect speed, not GPU count, increasingly decides how much of a cluster's compute actually gets used.

• iPronics raised $125 million (€107.6 million) in a Series B co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with NVIDIA joining as a strategic investor.
• The Valencia, Spain startup, spun off from Universitat Politècnica de València in 2019, builds silicon-photonics optical circuit switches (OCS) that reroute light between servers instead of converting it to electricity at each hop.
• Its ONE-32 switch reconfigures a network in under 300 microseconds with sub-30-nanosecond latency, and iPronics aims to shrink the hardware about 20-fold to pack more switches per rack.
• The round nearly triples iPronics' total funding to $177 million (€152.3 million) for a six-year-old university spinout.
• Optical circuit switching was popularized by Google, which has used it for years to wire together its TPU pods, inspiring a wave of startups chasing the same market.
• Founder and CTO Daniel Pérez-López told Reuters that chip failures in massive AI clusters now happen on a scale of minutes, making networks that can instantly reroute traffic a core resiliency requirement.
• As AI training clusters scale past hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the interconnect is becoming as decisive to compute utilization as the accelerators themselves, drawing strategic capital from NVIDIA into rivals of its own optics suppliers.