Silicon photonics startup nEye Systems has closed a $58 million funding round.

The Series B round was led by CapitalG and saw participation from Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Micron Ventures, Nvidia, and Socratic Partners.

It brings the total raised by the company to $72.5m, following a previously unannounced Series A round, which saw nEye secure investments from Teda Holdings and Innolight Technology USA.

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Emeryville, California, the startup has been developing optical switches to help eliminate bottlenecks in AI workloads. Based on ten years of research from the company’s co-founder, Professor Ming Wu at UC Berkeley, the switches use light instead of electrical signals to transmit data, meaning it doesn’t experience the same heat or resistance as traditional chip architectures.

According to nEye, its radix silicon photonic switch is 100x smaller, has 1,000x lower power consumption, is 10,000x faster, and has 10x lower cost when compared to existing optical switch solutions. By taking a wafer-scale approach, the company says it is able to provide a more “efficient and cost-effective solution,” utilizing direct optical connections, which offer “virtually unlimited” bandwidth.

“We are thrilled to have the support of CapitalG and our other esteemed investors as we scale our optical switch technology,” said Professor Wu. “Our wafer-scale approach, backed by years of research at UC Berkeley, positions us to transform the AI fabric and enable the next generation of high-performance computing.”