Aylight raises €4.5M pre-seed to reinvent the laser behind AI's optical bottleneck

ZÜRICH, Switzerland — July 6, 2026 — Aylight, a photonics company building chip-scale multiwavelength lasers, today announced a €4.5M pre-seed financing round, co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures with participation from Verve Ventures and Plug and Play. The funding takes Aylight's laser from a research result to first prototypes, manufactured in a semiconductor foundry. It also lets Aylight expand its R&D team — the company is now hiring across core tech roles (aylight.io/careers).

The raise comes as the laser emerges as a central constraint on scaling artificial intelligence. In March 2026, Nvidia committed $4 billion across Coherent and Lumentum to secure advanced laser and optical-interconnect supply for AI data centers — a public signal that moving data between chips, rather than raw compute, increasingly limits how far AI infrastructure can scale. Today each optical link requires its own laser, and that approach does not reach the throughput that datacenters will demand.

"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 realizing it was the answer — so we translated it into a new kind of laser built for AI datacenters. By rethinking the light source itself, we unlock performance that wasn't there before, from the individual device all the way up to the full system. That's a foundation the whole industry can build on, and we're already seeing strong customer interest. This round takes us to first products."

Bahareh Marzban, co-founder and CEO of Aylight

Aylight takes a different route to the same problem: instead of supplying more of today's lasers, it changes what a single laser does. Its chip emits a comb — many precisely spaced wavelengths at once — so one device delivers the parallelism that until now required dozens of discrete lasers. The underlying architecture, a frequency-modulated comb (FM comb), is built on the standard semiconductor-laser platform, which means it can be manufactured in existing photonics foundries.

Aylight grew out of ETH Zürich research and a late-2024 photonics conference, where Bahareh Marzban presented a radically new laser concept and Dmitry Kazakov, drawing on his doctoral research, saw what it could become; the two founded the company in 2025.

"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 behavior no existing light source can offer. It positions Aylight to build the world's supreme lasers. The science was too good, and too timely, to leave on a lab bench."

Dmitry Kazakov, co-founder and CTO of Aylight

That behavior extends well past the data center. The unique properties of Aylight's comb laser engines enable ranging with micrometer-scale depth resolution — far finer than conventional LiDAR — opening applications in semiconductor inspection and metrology, and in high-resolution 3D sensing for industrial automation and precision robotics.

"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 industrialize 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. We are very excited to partner with Bahar and Dmitry!"

Clément Vanden Driessche, Partner at Elaia

"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, and that outcompetes any existing solution in this field."

Pär Lange, Partner at Swisscom Ventures