Xscape Photonics just raised another $37 million, pushing their total Series A to $81 million. Addition led this latest round, with continued backing from IAG Capital Partners, NVIDIA, and others.
This builds on their $44 million Series A from 2024, and they’re also launching FalconX, the industry’s first fully redundant External Laser Small Form-factor Pluggable (ELSFP) device. It pumps out up to eight wavelengths of light for ultra-fast, high-capacity, low-power optical data transmission.
Founded in 2022 by Raghunathan and photonics heavyweights from Columbia University, Alexander Gaeta (President), Yoshi Okawachi (VP of R&D), Keren Bergman, and Michal Lipson (both on the Board of Advisors), Xscape has now pulled in nearly $95 million total.
FalconX: Reliability by Design
AI inference is hitting bottlenecks with old-school copper interconnects in data centers—they just can’t handle the data escaping accelerators to neighbors or memory in massive AI clusters.
FalconX tackles this “escape bandwidth” issue with Xscape’s proprietary CombX laser tech, which cranks out multiple light wavelengths on a single silicon photonics chip for high-performance, multi-color optical links.
A single FalconX module delivers over 1W of optical power across eight colors, enabling multi-terabits-per-second bandwidth. With AI clusters ballooning 10x in size over two years, one laser failure can tank the whole network and spike token costs. Hyperscalers now demand 10x better reliability, and FalconX delivers with built-in redundancy and tougher components.
It follows industry MSA standards for Scale-Up/Scale-Out fabrics and slots right into existing hyperscaler setups.
ChromX: Scaling to 128+ Colors
FalconX marks a big step toward ChromX, Xscape’s programmable multi-wavelength photonics platform for custom AI data center fabrics. Scaling FalconX tech, they’re aiming for 16, 32, and eventually 128+ colors.
Last August 2025, they demoed working 16-color CombX prototypes with Tower Semiconductor. In June 2025, they dropped the EagleX Laser Evaluation Kit for ChromX.
Leadership Comments
“Rapidly increasing bandwidth, power and cost demands of AI workloads have created a critical hardware bottleneck, forcing developers to use just a fraction of their GPUs’ capacity, thereby limiting the revolutionary potential of AI itself,” said Vivek Raghunathan, Xscape Photonics’ CEO and co-founder. “With the support of our world-class investors, Xscape Photonics is accelerating the development of its multi-color wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) fabric solutions to escape these hardware limits and fundamentally reimagine how data moves through data center networks. FalconX is the industry’s first Comb laser module in a pluggable form factor capable of generating eight wavelengths of light, powering high-speed data movement to allow the entire data center to function as one giant GPU.”
“We are proud to support Xscape Photonics in its mission to redefine data center fabrics for the age of AI,” said Lee Fixel, Founder of Addition. “We see this as a compelling opportunity to invest in optical laser innovation at a moment when advanced photonics is becoming critical to AI infrastructure. With innovations like FalconX’s eight-wavelength redundant laser and the ChromX roadmap to 128+ colors, Xscape is addressing the bandwidth bottlenecks that constrain AI cluster performance today. The team brings deep engineering expertise and scientific rigor, and we’re excited to partner with them as they transform how data moves at AI scale.”
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