Insider Brief
- Semiconductor startup Xscape Photonics raised $37 million in additional funding led by Addition, bringing its total Series A funding to $81 million to advance photonic networking technologies for AI data centers.
- The company also launched FalconX, a pluggable laser module capable of emitting eight wavelengths of light to enable faster, lower-power optical data transmission and address bandwidth bottlenecks in AI data center networks.
- Founded in 2022 by researchers from Columbia University, Xscape Photonics is developing its ChromX photonics platform to scale optical networking to 128 or more wavelengths, supporting higher-performance AI clusters and large-scale data center infrastructure.
PRESS RELEASE— Xscape Photonics (“the Company”), a semiconductor startup developing photonic solutions for next-generation AI data center fabrics, announced $37 million in additional funding, bringing the company’s total Series A funding to $81 million. The latest funding was led by Addition, a new investor, with continued support from existing investors, including IAG Capital Partners and NVIDIA, among others.
The new investment builds on the company’s $44 million Series A round announced in 2024. Xscape Photonics also announced the launch of FalconX: the industry’s first fully redundant External Laser Small Form-factor Pluggable (ELSFP) device capable of emitting up to eight wavelengths or colors of light for ultra-fast, high-capacity and low-power optical data transmission.
“Rapidly increasing bandwidth, power and cost demands of AI workloads have created a critical hardware bottleneck, forcing developers to use just a fraction of their GPUs’ capacity, thereby limiting the revolutionary potential of AI itself,” said Vivek Raghunathan, Xscape Photonics’ CEO and co-founder. “With the support of our world-class investors, Xscape Photonics is accelerating the development of its multi-color wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) fabric solutions to escape these hardware limits and fundamentally reimagine how data moves through data center networks. FalconX is the industry’s first Comb laser module in a pluggable form factor capable of generating eight wavelengths of light, powering high-speed data movement to allow the entire data center to function as one giant GPU.”
Xscape Photonics was founded in 2022 by Raghunathan and four photonics visionaries from Columbia University — Alexander Gaeta (President), Yoshi Okawachi (Vice President of R&D), Keren Bergman (Board of Advisors Member) and Michal Lipson (Board of Advisors Member) — and has since raised nearly $95 million in total funding.
“We are proud to support Xscape Photonics in its mission to redefine data center fabrics for the age of AI,” said Lee Fixel, Founder of Addition. “We see this as a compelling opportunity to invest in optical laser innovation at a moment when advanced photonics is becoming critical to AI infrastructure. With innovations like FalconX’s eight-wavelength redundant laser and the ChromX roadmap to 128+ colors, Xscape is addressing the bandwidth bottlenecks that constrain AI cluster performance today. The team brings deep engineering expertise and scientific rigor, and we’re excited to partner with them as they transform how data moves at AI scale.”
FalconX: Reliability by Design
AI inference performance is constrained by conventional data center networks that rely on outdated copper interconnects, significantly limiting the amount of data that can escape from each accelerator to neighboring accelerators or memory within AI clusters. FalconX helps solve this “escape bandwidth” bottleneck by employing Xscape Photonics’ proprietary CombX laser technology, which generates multiple wavelengths of light on a single silicon photonics chip and enables the integration of high-performance, multi-color optical interconnects into AI data center networks.
With more than 1W of optical power from a single pluggable laser module, FalconX generates eight colors which can power multi-terabits-per-second of data bandwidth. AI clusters have grown more than tenfold in size over the last two years, and the failure of a single laser module can significantly impact the network, stalling the workload and increasing the token cost. Hyperscalers demand 10 times fewer failures compared to the incumbent laser level due to the growth of AI clusters. FalconX offers built-in redundancy and more reliable components to meet growing cluster demands.
FalconX is designed to comply with industry MSA standards for Scale-Up and Scale-Out fabric links and can be qualified in existing hyperscaler infrastructure.
ChromX: The Road to 128+ Colors
The launch of FalconX represents a significant milestone in Xscape Photonics’ development of ChromX, the industry’s first programmable multi-wavelength photonics platform for custom AI data center fabrics.
By further scaling FalconX ELSFP technologies into ChromX, Xscape Photonics is developing a holistic WDM fabric platform targeting the emission of 16, 32 and, ultimately, 128 colors and beyond. In August 2025, Xscape Photonics successfully demonstrated functional, 16‑color CombX prototypes in collaboration with Tower Semiconductor. In June 2025, Xscape Photonics launched the EagleX Laser Evaluation Kit for the ChromX platform.
Get in Touch
For questions regarding the sampling of FalconX or other business inquiries, please contact: sales@xscapephotonics.com.
Xscape Photonics continues to grow its global team of best-in-class engineering and developer talent. For more information, visit: www.xscapephotonics.com/join-us.
About Xscape Photonics
Xscape Photonics develops custom photonic platform solutions designed for ultra-high bandwidth connections inside data centers to power AI systems. The company’s proprietary ChromX platform targets scaling of AI computing performance in an environmentally sustainable manner and is optimized for power, cost, scale and reliability. To learn more, follow us on LinkedIn or visit www.xscapephotonics.com.
Contacts
Media Contact:
Stephen Russell for Xscape Photonics
Wireside Communications
Email: srussell@wireside.com
Phone: +1–774–273–3890
