British Business Bank invests £10m in Salience Labs as part of $125m Series B funding round
Press release
The British Business Bank has invested £10m in Salience Labs, the Oxford spin-out building optical switches to remove a key bottleneck in AI networking – the speed at which data moves between GPUs.
The investment is part of a $125m Series B led by UK-headquartered Bullhound Capital, alongside strategic backing from AMD Ventures and Intel Capital.
Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Oxford, Salience Labs is a university spin out from the University of Oxford and the University of Münster developing optical circuit switching.
As demand for artificial intelligence continues to increase, the need for faster and more efficient communication between graphics processing units has become increasingly important. Salience Labs' optical switching platform is designed to reduce network latency, power consumption and cost, helping improve the performance and efficiency of AI infrastructure.
With this new funding, Salience Labs will accelerate the deployment of its optical circuit switching technology, scale its volume manufacturing operations and expand its U.S. presence.
Other investors include SBI Group, Hudson River Trading, as well as continued support from existing shareholders including Applied Ventures LLC, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.
Charlotte Lawrence, Managing Director and Head of Direct Equity, British Business Bank, said,
Today’s AI data centres are increasingly limited by the efficiency of the networking and unlocking this bottleneck is key to unlocking AI’s ability to cost effectively deliver on its full value. Salience Labs’ optical switching tackles that bottleneck head-on, transforming the economics at the heart of AI infrastructure.
This investment is also a stand-out example of how the UK’s world-class universities are a competitive advantage in the VC market, turning decades of research into companies in AI and deeptech that can lead globally. Salience’s team prove you can advance science and turn it into a product customers will buy at scale.
Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs, said,
Optical circuit switching will play a critical role in AI datacentre networking. As customers roll out optical links in their datacentres, high-performance optical switches are needed to deliver the token economics that workloads demand.
Salience Labs has demonstrated a market leading technology: a fully integrated on-chip solution that scales well to high volume manufacturing. This funding, alongside the support of our strategic investors AMD Ventures and Intel Capital, will accelerate our growth into high volume production to enable world leading performance in AI data centres
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Notes to editors
About the British Business Bank
The British Business Bank is the UK government’s economic development bank. Established in November 2014, its mission is to drive economic growth by helping smaller businesses get the finance they need to start, scale and stay in the UK. Its remit is to design, deliver and efficiently manage UK-wide smaller business access to finance programmes for the UK government.
In 2025/26Read footnote text 1 , the Bank supported UK smaller businesses to access £9.4bn of finance, made up of £1.3bn of public funding, £4.3bn of private capital crowded in by the Bank and £3.7bn of lending the Bank guaranteed. The funding benefited 38,000 UK businesses, including around 30,000 businesses the Bank had not previously helped to fund.
British Business Bank plc is a public limited company registered in England and Wales, registration number 08616013, registered office at Steel City House, West Street, Sheffield, S1 2GQ. It is a development bank wholly owned by HM Government. British Business Bank plc and its subsidiaries are not banking institutions and do not operate as such. With the exception of BBB Investment Services Limited they are not authorised or regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority or the Financial Conduct Authority. BBB Investment Services Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. A complete legal structure chart for the group can be found at british-business-bank.co.uk.
The Patient Capital Funds programme is operated by British Patient Capital Limited, a wholly owned commercial subsidiary of British Business Bank plc.
British Patient Capital Limited is registered in England and Wales with company number 11271076, and registered office at Steel City House, West Street, Sheffield, S1 2GQ. British Patient Capital makes commitments and invests on its own behalf and on behalf of third-party investors whose investments British Patient Capital manages.
About Salience Labs
Salience Labs is a leader in photonic solutions targeting connectivity for AI datacenter infrastructure. Founded in 2021 and backed by over a decade of research from the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Münster in Germany, Salience’s innovative developments in photonic switching technology enable high-speed, ultra-low latency networking fabrics that remove infrastructure bottlenecks for AI workloads. Learn more at www.saliencelabs.ai
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Figures as at end March 2026
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