Swiss photonics startup Aylight has raised €4.5 million in a pre-seed funding round to support the development of its chip-scale multiwavelength laser technology. The round was co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures, with participation from Verve Ventures and Plug and Play.
Founded in 2025 by Bahareh Marzban and Dmitry Kazakov following research at ETH Zürich, Aylight develops chip-scale multiwavelength lasers for AI data-centre optical interconnects and high-precision frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) sensing.
Its technology generates multiple precisely spaced wavelengths from a single chip, reducing the need for multiple discrete lasers in optical communication systems. The architecture is based on a frequency-modulated comb (FM comb) and is designed to be manufactured using existing semiconductor photonics foundries.
The company said demand for more efficient optical interconnects is increasing as AI infrastructure scales and data transfer between chips becomes an increasingly important factor in data centre performance.
Bahareh Marzban, co-founder and CEO of Aylight, said the company was founded to tackle one of the key constraints facing AI infrastructure:
We started from a problem rather than a technology: the laser had become one of the constraints on scaling AI infrastructure. This funding will help us bring our technology from research to our first products.
The funding will support the development of the company's first semiconductor-foundry prototypes and the expansion of its research and development team.
Beyond optical interconnects, the company's laser technology is also intended for applications such as semiconductor inspection, metrology, industrial automation, and precision robotics, where high-resolution three-dimensional sensing is required.
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