- Zurich’s Aylight has raised €4.5M in pre-seed for a laser chip that emits multiple wavelengths simultaneously, aiming to reduce the number of lasers AI data centres need.
- The round is a fraction of the money raised by rivals Ayar Labs ($500M) and Lightmatter ($400M), and comes weeks after Nvidia committed $4B to secure laser supply.
- It’s not the only startup chasing this fix: Swiss-American Enlightra raised $15M in December 2025 with a strikingly similar pitch.
In March 2026, Nvidia committed $4B across Coherent and Lumentum to lock down laser and optical-interconnect supply for AI data centres, a signal that moving data between chips, not raw compute, is becoming AI infrastructure’s next constraint.
A Zurich startup thinks the industry is solving the wrong problem. Aylight has raised €4.5 million in a pre-seed round, co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures with Verve Ventures and Plug and Play also participating, to build a chip that could make buying more lasers beside the point.
“We started from a problem, not a technology: the laser had become one of the real limits on how far AI can scale. What convinced me was seeing something first demonstrated for a completely different application and realising it was the answer — so we translated it into a new kind of laser built for AI datacenters,” says Bahareh Marzban, Aylight’s co-founder and CEO.
A chip that does the work of dozens of lasers
Today, each optical link in a data centre typically requires its own dedicated laser to transmit data between chips. Aylight’s answer is a frequency-modulated comb architecture that generates many precisely spaced wavelengths from a single chip, so a single device performs the parallel work that used to require dozens of separate lasers.
Crucially, the design runs on standard semiconductor-laser platforms, meaning it can be built inside existing photonics foundries rather than requiring new manufacturing infrastructure.
Aylight traces its roots to research at ETH Zürich, where Marzban developed the underlying laser concept. She presented it at a photonics conference in late 2024, where Dmitry Kazakov, drawing on his doctoral research in laser physics, saw a commercial opportunity. The two founded the company in 2025 and are headquartered in Zürich, where Aylight is now hiring across engineering and research roles.
“Everyone assumed the semiconductor laser was a solved problem. It isn’t — there was physics left to find. That discovery lets us redesign the laser from first principles instead of fighting the limits of conventional designs, and it unlocks behaviour no existing light source can offer,” notes Kazakov, Aylight’s co-founder and CTO.
Aylight isn’t the only startup with this idea
Aylight’s real test isn’t Nvidia. It’s a crowded field of well-funded rivals building around the same underlying bottleneck. Ayar Labs raised $500 million in a March 2026 Series E at a $3.75 billion valuation to scale its optical I/O technology, with backing from Nvidia and AMD. Lightmatter closed a $400 million Series D at a $4.4 billion valuation in 2024 to build photonic computing systems for AI data centres. Both focus on moving light more efficiently between chips using conventional lasers.
The closer comparison is Y Combinator-backed Enlightra, which emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $15 million in funding, pursuing a similar idea: a single specialised laser generating dozens of distinct wavelengths to replace discrete lasers on standard silicon manufacturing lines.
Where Enlightra’s chip produces more than fifty colours of light using an approach the company has already demonstrated over kilometres of fibre, Aylight believes its frequency-modulated comb architecture can deliver comparable channel density with tighter wavelength locking, though this claim has not been independently tested at scale.
With a fraction of the capital of Ayar Labs or Lightmatter, and a direct rival that got a year’s head start, Aylight’s technical differentiation will matter more than most seed-stage pitches.
Why investors are paying attention
“Aylight is the kind of exceptional company where physics, founders, and market timing converge at once: a genuine scientific leap, carried by a world-class team with the rare ability to industrialise it, at precisely the moment when optics is becoming the backbone of AI infrastructure. Tokens per watt is emerging as the defining metric of AI, and Aylight’s DWDM platform has the potential to be the breakthrough answer to that challenge,” says Clément Vanden Driessche, partner at Elaia.
Pär Lange, partner at Swisscom Ventures, adds: “In the effort to meet the ever-increasing demand for higher data speeds, while limiting energy consumption and footprint, Aylight has produced a truly unique and elegant solution for precision DWDM laser sources. We believe Aylight can offer a scalable technology that targets the fast-growing market for optical connectivity in data centres.”
Beyond AI data centres, Aylight says the same comb-laser technology could extend into semiconductor inspection, industrial metrology, and high-resolution 3D sensing for robotics.
What’s next?
The global optical interconnect market was valued at $16.06 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $34.54 billion by 2030 at a 14.1% CAGR, according to Grand View Research, driven largely by hyperscalers’ shift toward 800G and 1.6T optical links. Aylight’s funding will go toward manufacturing its first foundry-produced prototypes and expanding its engineering and research teams.
NVIDIA’s $4 billion says the industry believes more lasers are the answer. Aylight, Enlightra, and a growing list of comb-laser startups are betting it’s the wrong question entirely. The next 18 months will show which side of that argument the market actually rewards.
