About
OpenLight is a US silicon photonics company based in Goleta, California, with a second office in Santa Clara. It was formed in 2022 when Synopsys and Juniper Networks combined to spin out Juniper's silicon photonics assets into a standalone company, with Synopsys initially holding the majority stake. The underlying technology is older than the company itself and traces back to Aurrion, a 2008 spin-out from the University of California, Santa Barbara that Juniper acquired in 2016. OpenLight became fully independent in 2025 and is led by President and CEO Adam Carter. OpenLight builds an open silicon photonics platform that places indium phosphide lasers directly onto silicon, a heterogeneous integration approach that lets it ship complete photonic application-specific integrated circuits, which it calls PASICs. Its process design kit gives chip designers a library of active and passive components including on-chip lasers, modulators, amplifiers, and detectors, and the designs are manufactured through its foundry partner Tower Semiconductor. The company holds more than 410 patents and is pushing reference photonic integrated circuits toward 1.6 terabit and 3.2 terabit data rates. The main market is optical interconnects for AI data centers and telecom networks. OpenLight also points to its platform serving automotive and industrial sensing, medical devices, and quantum computing, though quantum is one application among several rather than the company's core focus. It is best understood as an enabling photonics supplier rather than a quantum hardware maker. OpenLight raised a 34 million dollar Series A in August 2025, co-led by Xora Innovation and Capricorn Investment Group, with participation from Mayfield, Juniper Networks (now part of HPE), Lam Research Capital, New Legacy Ventures, and K2 Access. In April 2026 it added a 50 million dollar Series A-1 round led by Matter Venture Partners, with new backers Acclimate Ventures and Catapult Ventures joining existing i
Quantum Specifications
| Quantum Focus | hardware |