Salience Labs

Salience Labs is an Oxford-Münster university spin-out developing photonic switch technology for AI datacentre infrastructure. Founded in 2021 by CEO Vaysh Kewada alongside academic founders Professor Harish Bhaskaran (Oxford), Professor Wolfram Pernice (Münster), and Dr Johannes Feldmann, the company commercialises a brain-inspired optical switching technology first published in Nature in 2020. It was spun out through Oxford Sciences Enterprises, where Vaysh had spent 18 months as Entrepreneur in Residence building the commercial strategy alongside the academic founding team.

Salience Labs develops all-optical silicon photonic switches that enable AI compute nodes to communicate directly using light rather than converting signals to electrical form, eliminating the transceivers and latency inherent in conventional copper and electronic switching. Its product family — including a recently released 32-port all-optical silicon photonic switch — enables datacentres to dramatically reduce network latency, increase bandwidth, and lower power consumption for scale-up AI training and inference workloads. The technology is compatible with existing optical infrastructure and standard control interfaces, making deployment straightforward for hyperscalers and large enterprises.

The company raised a $30 million Series A in 2025 led by ICM HPQC Fund and Applied Ventures (the VC arm of Applied Materials), bringing total funding to over $45 million. Investors also include Cambridge Innovation Capital, Oxford Sciences Enterprises, and semiconductor industry leaders. Salience Labs has 50+ employees, has partnered with Keysight Technologies to develop the first optical circuit switch testing environment, and has been named a Sifted leading UK startup and a winner of the Optics category in the IPqwery rankings.