Aylight Secures 4.5 Million Euros for Its Laser Technology

(CONNECT) Zurich-based photonics company Aylight has announced the completion of a pre-seed funding round totaling 4.5 million euros. According to a press release, the company—founded in 2025 by Bahareh Marzban and Dmitry Kazakov—develops chip-scale multi-wavelength lasers. The funding will be used to manufacture the first prototypes at a semiconductor factory and to expand Aylight's research and development team. The funding round was led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures, with participation from Verve Ventures and Plug and Play.

Data exchange between chips is increasingly limiting the scalability of artificial intelligence infrastructure. "Currently, each optical connection requires its own laser, and this approach does not achieve the throughput that data centers need," Aylight explains in the press release. Aylight's new laser technology could now solve this problem. "The chip emits a frequency comb—many precisely spaced wavelengths simultaneously—so that a single device can achieve the parallelism that previously required dozens of discrete lasers."

Aylight's technology enables distance measurements with depth resolution in the micrometer range. This would allow it to be used in various fields, such as semiconductor inspection and metrology, as well as in high-resolution 3D sensor technology for industrial automation and precision robotics.

“We are convinced that Aylight can offer a scalable technology that serves the rapidly growing market for optical connectivity in data centers and outperforms all existing solutions in this field,” Pär Lange, a partner at Swisscom Ventures, is quoted as saying in the press release. ce/nta