Solinide, a Swedish startup commercializing photonic chips for AI data centers, has closed a €4M seed round backed by six financial and strategic investors.
The round was co-led by Navigare Ventures and PSV Hafnium, with Chalmers Ventures, Turbine Capital, Norrsken Evolve and Almi Greentech Fund also participating.
The company, spun out of Chalmers University of Technology, builds silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits and microcomb technology for optical interconnects. Its chips tackle one of AI infrastructure’s biggest headaches: shuttling vast amounts of data between chips without an equal explosion in power consumption.
A single Solinide chip emits dozens of exact colors of light at once, doing the work of whole racks of lasers so that more data flows down each fiber using far less power.
Founders argue the timing matters because AI training clusters now hit physical limits on electrical and thermal loads, making energy-efficient optical links a bottleneck for the next generation of data centers. The company says its microcomb technology has already demonstrated the performance needed for data center links and can ship as an integrated rack-mounted product.
The funding will support work on technology readiness, commercialization and market adoption as Solinide moves from lab demonstrations toward volume deployment with data center operators.
