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.