iPronics raises $125M Series B to rewire AI data centres with light
Maverick Silicon and Light Street just led a $125M Series B into Valencia's iPronics, with Nvidia joining - betting optical switching becomes the backbone of AI data centres.
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Founded 2019 · Valencia, Spain
iPronics has raised a $125 million Series B led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with Nvidia among ten co-investors, to scale its solid-state optical switch for AI data centres from Valencia.
We keep being told the AI buildout is decided in Nevada campuses and Taiwanese fabs – and yet the deepest European hardware round announced this week lands in Valencia, in a company spun out of a university lab. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, and why serious money is suddenly obsessed with moving light instead of electrons.
Two US leads and Nvidia in the syndicate
iPronics announced the $125 million Series B on 2 September 2026, co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital. The syndicate behind them is long and pointed: Nvidia, Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund, The Tate Family Trust, Fine Structure Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Build Collective and Criteria Venture Tech. The round takes the company’s total funding to $177 million (company announcement, 2 September 2026).
The money goes where a Series B should: scaling operations, accelerating commercial deployment of the iPronics ONE switch, and staffing a new office in Santa Clara to sit closer to the hyperscalers writing the cheques for AI infrastructure. Maverick Silicon’s Manish Muthal and Light Street advisor Geoffrey Tate join the board, and Young Sohn joins as company advisor – three names that read like a deliberate bridge into the US semiconductor establishment.
A Valencia spin-off that switches light, not electrons
Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from the Universitat Politècnica de València by founder and CTO Daniel Pérez-López, and led by CEO Christian Dupont, iPronics builds programmable photonic chips. Its product, the iPronics ONE, is a rack-mounted optical circuit switch: instead of converting every signal between GPUs into electrons and back, it reroutes the light itself, in solid state, with the control software, telemetry and APIs data centre operators expect from any other piece of networking kit.
Why does that matter? Because in an AI cluster the network is now the bottleneck, and every optical-electrical conversion costs power and latency that operators can no longer spare. Our tracker lists iPronics’ previous outing as a €20 million Series A, so this round is a change of category, not a step up – the kind of jump that only happens when customers, not just investors, have validated the hardware.
A $0.56 billion market compounding at 28.5%
The segment iPronics sells into is small and growing violently: the global optical circuit switches market is expected to be worth $0.56 billion in 2026 and $2.52 billion by 2032, a 28.5% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, June 2026). Google normalised the idea by disclosing in 2023 that its TPU clusters run on its own optical circuit switches, and every hyperscaler has been hunting for a merchant supplier since. A market that quintuples in six years is exactly where a Series B company wants to be standing when the buying wave arrives.
For scale from our own database: this morning we covered INLEAP Photonics’ €20 million seed for laser drone defence – a different application, but the same European photonics bench producing it. Two photonics rounds on consecutive slots is not a coincidence; it is a sector coming of age.
Spain’s second nine-figure hardware round in two days
What we are seeing is a pattern sharpening. On Tuesday it was Mitsubishi Electric leading a €108 million extension into PLD Space in Elche; a day later, two US funds and Nvidia put $125 million into Valencia. Spanish deeptech just posted two nine-figure rounds in 48 hours, neither of them in Madrid or Barcelona – and both anchored by the exact strategic buyers of the technology.
The reality is that Europe still does not lead these rounds itself: the term sheets came from San Francisco and Tokyo, not from Paris or Frankfurt. The good news is what stayed European – the founding team, the engineering, the university pipeline that produced it, and the European Innovation Council Fund, which backed iPronics early and held on into the Series B. Public money did its job here: it kept a photonics team in Valencia long enough for the market to arrive, the same layering we saw with ESA and PLD Space.
What to watch next: whether iPronics converts the Santa Clara office into named hyperscaler deployments, and whether the next Spanish photonics seed – and our fundraising tracker says there will be one soon – can raise its growth round without crossing the Atlantic for a lead.
The false goal is a European Nvidia. The real one is owning the layers where physics decides the winner, not capex – and optical switching is exactly such a layer. Let’s keep the light coming out of Valencia.
