French startup Lightspring has secured €3.1 million in a seed funding round led by Atlantic and OVNI Capital. Additional participants include Concept Ventures, Ixcore, Plug and Play Ventures, and several business angels. Alongside this investment, the company received a €350,000 grant as a laureate of the French i-Lab deeptech competition, bringing total financing to over €3.5 million.
The company specializes in optical interfaces for photonic integrated circuits. It utilizes 3D lithography, specifically two-photon polymerization, to fabricate coupling structures like microlenses and waveguides directly onto chips. This approach aims to replace traditional active alignment, which currently accounts for approximately 50 percent of total production costs for photonic integrated circuits.
Lightspring’s technology is designed to reduce coupling losses to below 0.5 dB per interface and shorten design cycles to under two weeks. The startup’s intellectual property includes a Process Design Kit dedicated to 3D optical coupling, supported by software design tools. The underlying research originated at the FEMTO-ST Institute in Besancon.
The new capital will be used to expand the team to 12 employees, develop design tools, and initiate co-design programs with industrial partners. The primary goal is to transition the 3D optical coupling process from laboratory research to a qualified industrial production line, addressing the manufacturing bottlenecks currently faced by the AI infrastructure sector.
