Solinide Closes €4M to Commercialise Photonic Chips That Could Cut AI Data Centre Power Bills

Solinide Photonics, a Swedish deeptech company spun out of Chalmers University of Technology, has raised 4 million euros in seed funding to commercialise its silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit technology and prepare for scalable manufacturing. The round was co‑led by Navigare Ventures and PSV Hafnium, with participation from Chalmers Ventures, Turbine Capital, Norrsken Evolve, and Almi Greentech Fund.

The company, founded in 2021, develops photonic chips and microcomb technology built to address one of the more stubborn constraints on AI infrastructure growth: the volume of data that needs to move between chips inside AI data centres keeps climbing, but power consumption cannot keep climbing at the same rate without infrastructure costs and cooling requirements spiralling out of control. Solinide's approach targets that specific bottleneck at the optical interconnect layer, the physical links carrying data between processors and other computing hardware at data centre scale.

At the core of Solinide's technology is what the company calls its microcomb chip, a single silicon nitride device capable of generating dozens of precise wavelengths of light simultaneously, replacing the multiple discrete laser sources that conventional optical interconnects typically require. By consolidating many lasers into one integrated multi‑wavelength source, the chip allows significantly more data to travel through each optical fibre while reducing the energy consumption, physical footprint, and overall cost of every optical connection in a network. According to Solinide, its microcomb chips have achieved more than 60 percent optical conversion efficiency from continuous wave laser light to optical combs, a figure the company describes as more than six times the 5 to 10 percent efficiency typical of the industry standard.

That level of efficiency matters because it directly enables what is known as co‑packaged optics, an architecture where optical components sit physically closer to processing chips than in traditional designs, cutting the electrical‑to‑optical conversion losses that occur when data has to travel further between separate electronic and optical components. Co‑packaged optics is increasingly viewed across the semiconductor and networking industry as a necessary next step for scaling AI training clusters and hyperscale data centres, since conventional pluggable optical transceivers are approaching practical limits on bandwidth density and power efficiency as AI workloads continue to scale.

Solinide says its microcomb technology has already demonstrated the performance required for data centre links and has been integrated into a working rack‑mounted system, moving the company beyond laboratory demonstration toward a product that more closely resembles what a data centre operator would actually deploy. Chief executive Marcello Girardo framed the current stage of the company's development around that same transition. "A key priority now is preparing for commercial readiness, launch and real‑world deployment with the aim of sharing product news very shortly," Girardo said. "We are thrilled to have the confidence of prominent investors in Solinide's team and technology."

The new capital will support several priorities at once, according to the company: expanding Solinide's engineering and commercial teams, strengthening its in‑house prototyping capabilities, building manufacturing readiness in Europe, and deepening collaboration with strategic industry partners. Solinide has separately described a partnership with Nvidia and operates an open multi‑project wafer service, giving other members of the photonics community access to its silicon nitride fabrication platform, a model that could position the company as infrastructure for a broader ecosystem of photonics developers rather than solely a component supplier.

PSV Hafnium managing partner Jakob Rybak‑Andersen pointed to the scale of the underlying opportunity as a key factor behind the firm's decision to co‑lead the round, given how central optical interconnects have become to continued AI infrastructure scaling. Solinide's positioning sits at a rare intersection of academic photonics research, semiconductor manufacturing, and AI infrastructure economics, a combination that has drawn increasing venture interest as data centre operators face mounting pressure to keep power consumption growth from outpacing the raw compute gains AI workloads demand.

Solinide's technical claims, including its propagation loss figures below 0.03 decibels per centimetre and Q‑factors around 5 million in its current silicon nitride processes, place it among a small group of European photonics startups working to translate university‑grade optical research into components that can be manufactured and deployed at data centre scale. Whether Solinide can move from a validated rack‑mounted demonstration to broader commercial adoption will likely depend on how quickly it can prove out manufacturing yield and cost at volume, precisely the transition this seed round is intended to fund as the company works toward announcing its first commercial product.