Valencia-based silicon photonics company iPronics announced Wednesday the completion of a $125 million Series B funding round, co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with participation from NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA). Following this round, the company's cumulative funding has reached $177 million. The capital will be used to expand operations, accelerate commercial deployment, and meet demand for its rack-scale optical switching product, the Optical Networking Engine (ONE), within AI data centers.

Product positioning: programmable optical circuit switches

iPronics' core product is a programmable optical circuit switch. The company states that this device leverages silicon photonic chips to reconfigure intra-rack optical pathways in sub-millisecond timeframes, enabling networks to self-adjust during GPU failures or load fluctuations. The company's goal is to reduce the footprint of existing optical circuit switching equipment by approximately 20 times, allowing more ports to be housed within a single rack. The current chip is the 32-port ONE-32, with future plans targeting 72-port and 144-port configurations. Optical circuit switching itself is not a new concept—Google has already deployed similar devices in its tensor processing unit clusters for dynamically scaling compute and hot-swapping GPUs. According to public reports, iPronics' switches have been shipping for about a year and are currently collaborating with major AI infrastructure providers.

Company background and expansion

iPronics was spun out of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2019, with its legal name being IPronics Programmable Photonics, S.L. The company has established its first U.S. office in Santa Clara, California, and plans to use the proceeds from this round to expand its local team and production capabilities. In January 2025, the company completed an approximately €20 million Series A round and launched the ONE-32. This $125 million Series B brings total funding to $177 million.

Investor lineup

The round was co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with NVIDIA participating. Other new and existing shareholders include Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund, Tate Family Trust, Fine Structure Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Build Collective, and Criteria Venture Tech. Manish Muthal, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Silicon, has joined the board of directors, while Jeffrey Tate, former CEO of Rambus and current advisor to Light Street, has also joined the board. Catalight's Sun Zhenyao serves as an advisor. CEO Christian Dupont stated: "The support from Maverick Silicon, Light Street Capital, and NVIDIA reinforces our vision of establishing iPronics as a leader in a new class of optical networking." Muthal's public comments focused on how "programmable optical switching can help data centers scale performance while managing power consumption and costs." In March of this year, NVIDIA committed approximately $6 billion in optical-related partnerships with Coherent, Lumentum, and Marvell. This investment in iPronics takes the form of an equity stake, with the statement not disclosing the ownership percentage nor characterizing it as an exclusive supply arrangement.