Spain's iPronics raises $125 million from Nvidia, others for data center networking chips

Spanish startup iPronics announced on Tuesday that it has raised $125 million in a venture capital funding round with participation from AI chip giant Nvidia. The round was co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with additional backing from Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, and the European Innovation Council Fund. Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from the Technical University of Valencia, the company has raised a total of $177 million to date. iPronics develops optical circuit switches (OCS), an advanced networking technology popularized in AI data centers by Alphabet's Google. Optical switches provide critical network resilience by enabling data centers to dynamically reroute signals around failed computing chips on a minute-by-minute scale, which is crucial as modern AI clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of processors. iPronics aims to shrink the physical footprint of OCS hardware by approximately 20-fold compared to existing solutions, facilitating dense integration directly into server racks.