Photon Bridge raises €10M to manufacture lasers at the scale AI data centres need

Photon Bridge (Eindhoven) has raised €10 million in a round co-led by new investors Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital, with existing backers Innovation Industries, Faber, and the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) also increasing their stakes. The Eindhoven photonics company — formerly known as Photon IP — is building the laser infrastructure that AI data centres will need as optical interconnects move physically closer to the processors they serve. Founders Rui Santos and Xaveer Leijtens handed the CEO role to Paul Marchal in September 2025; the company's previous raise was a €4.75M Seed in January 2025 led by Innovation Industries.

The laser bottleneck nobody is talking about yet

Today's AI clusters move data between processors using a mix of electrical and optical links. As clusters scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of processors — Omdia forecasts more than 20 million data-centre AI accelerators shipping annually by 2028 — the data-movement problem becomes one of the defining constraints on system performance. Optics is the answer to that constraint, and the direction of travel is co-packaged optics: integrating optical connectivity directly alongside the chips responsible for routing data through the cluster.

That creates a supply problem nobody has fully solved yet. The current laser supply chain was built for telecom and subsea applications, where annual volumes are measured in the tens of thousands of units. AI infrastructure will demand millions.

Photon Bridge's bet is architectural. Rather than producing the required optical power from a small number of increasingly powerful — and increasingly difficult to manufacture — lasers, the company multiplexes light from multiple lower-power semiconductor lasers. Lower per-laser power density means lower sensitivity to manufacturing defects: yield improves. The platform delivers up to 40 mW of optical power per wavelength per fibre, is compatible with multiple indium phosphide (InP) foundries, and is designed to scale the way a chip platform scales rather than the way a specialist photonics component scales.

Who is backing it

The co-lead from Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital defines the thesis clearly: this is a round for investors who believe the laser market is on the verge of a category transition from specialty component to volume hardware. Both new investors are early in the investment cycle for co-packaged optics as a supply chain bet.

"Every new wave of compute creates new bottlenecks further down the supply chain, and lasers are the next one," said Ion Hauer, Investment Partner at APEX Ventures. "Photon Bridge is addressing this with a technology that combines deep photonics expertise with a credible path towards manufacturing at very large scale."

"AI is turning lasers from a telecom component into a semiconductor-scale product," added Cesare Maifredi, Partner at 360 Capital. "Once you start talking about millions of units a year, manufacturing yield becomes fundamental. Photon Bridge has designed its architecture from the beginning around the volumes this market is going to require."

ProYarn has tracked 360 Capital's bets across circular materials, Soource, and Bynario — a pattern of material-layer and deep-infrastructure investments where the technology cycle is long and the eventual market is large. The Photon Bridge investment extends that pattern into the physical AI hardware layer.

The financing will allow Photon Bridge to accelerate product development and customer qualification, deliver its first samples in 2027, and prepare for volume manufacturing from 2028.