iPronics Raises $125 Million for Optical AI Data Center Networking

iPronics raised $125 million in Series B funding, the company announced on its website. Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital co led the round, while NVIDIA joined as an investor. The financing brings the Valencia company's total funding to $177 million.

The problem it is selling into is a physical one. As AI clusters grow, the demands of scale up networking are pushing the industry from copper to optics, and iPronics argues that traditional network infrastructure has reached its power and bandwidth limits. Its optical circuit switches use silicon photonics to connect equipment within and between racks, with the iPronics ONE platform adding programmable connectivity, control software, telemetry and APIs for real time reconfiguration. The company frames the goal in terms of GPU utilisation: letting data centres use the accelerators they already have without rebuilding the network around them.

Chief executive Christian Dupont said the investment lets the company accelerate commercialisation and deliver the scale customers need for broad adoption. Manish Muthal of Maverick Silicon, who joins the board, said the growth of AI workloads has made optical circuit switching more critical than ever. He is joined on the board by Geoffrey Tate, an adviser to Light Street Capital, who was senior vice president of microprocessors at AMD, founding chief executive of Rambus, and most recently co founder and chief executive of Flex Logix.

Other participants included Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund, The Tate Family Trust, Fine Structure Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Build Collective and Criteria Venture Tech. The company will use the funding to expand production, deploy the platform with more customers, continue developing iPronics ONE and open an office in Santa Clara, California.