BOSTON: HyperLight Corp., a developer of thin-film lithium niobate photonics, said Thursday it closed an $80 million Series C funding round led by MediaTek, with participation from a consortium of semiconductor, manufacturing and investment firms.
The round includes UMC Capital, Jabil, Foxconn, EDBI, CDIB-TEN Capital and the Qatar Investment Authority, along with strategic investors from silicon IC and networking companies. Existing backers Summit Partners, The Engine, Foothill Ventures and Xora Innovation also participated.
The financing brings together companies across the AI infrastructure value chain, from chip design and foundry manufacturing to electronics services and global infrastructure investment, to scale TFLN photonics into high-volume production, the company said.
“This financing is about more than capital, it is about ecosystem alignment,” CEO Mian Zhang said in a statement.
“AI infrastructure requires optical interconnects that can deliver higher bandwidth, lower power and manufacturing scale across pluggable optics and co-packaged optics. HyperLight has spent years building the TFLN technology, manufacturing foundation and ecosystem relationships required to support that transition. This round accelerates our ability to scale with customers and partners globally.”
HyperLight’s TFLN Chiplet Platform is designed to unify short-reach data center pluggables, longer-reach coherent modules and co-packaged optics within a single high-volume manufacturable architecture, the company said. Products supporting 200G-per-lane operation are available, with 400G-per-lane solutions now sampling.
The platform combines high modulation bandwidth, CMOS-level drive voltage and low optical loss to reduce power consumption as AI networks scale to higher speeds, according to the company.
“Next-generation AI infrastructure requires optical connectivity that enables 3.2T and beyond,” said Brian Hsu, managing director of the MediaTek Innovation Fund. “TFLN’s combination of bandwidth and efficiency makes it a compelling technology for high-speed interconnects, and HyperLight is well positioned to support this transition.”
HyperLight said it will use the funding to expand manufacturing capacity, accelerate customer qualification, scale its chiplet platform and deepen partnerships across foundry, semiconductor, networking and systems integration.
The investment builds on a recently announced strategic manufacturing partnership with UMC and Wavetek for high-volume foundry production on both 6-inch and 8-inch wafers.
The company’s platform approach consolidates customer requirements into a standardized architecture to reduce ecosystem complexity and manufacturing risk while enabling cost-competitive adoption of TFLN photonics at global scale, HyperLight said.
HyperLight delivers integrated photonics solutions based on thin-film lithium niobate technology for AI data centers, telecom and metro networks and emerging photonics markets.
HyperLight delivers high-performance integrated photonics solutions based on thin-film lithium niobate technology. The company is based in Boston.
