Vaysh Kewada

Vaysh Kewada co-founded Salience Labs with Johannes Feldmann, now its chief technology officer, to commercialize optical computing research from the universities of Oxford and Münster. The company was incorporated in Oxfordshire in November 2020. Kewada, its chief executive, has an MSc in physics from Imperial College London and worked in strategy consulting at McKinsey before becoming an entrepreneur in residence at Oxford Science Enterprises, which backs the company.

Switching light, not electrons

Salience has narrowed its focus to one problem: the network inside AI data centers. Today most switches convert optical signals to electrical ones and back again, which adds power, latency and cost. Its optical circuit switches keep the signal as light, built on silicon photonic chips.

In February 2025 the company closed a $30m (£22m) Series A led by Applied Ventures and the ICM HPQC Fund. In February 2026 it signed a partnership with Tower Semiconductor to manufacture its switches on Tower’s silicon photonics platforms, moving from development into pre-production.

From launch to 64 ports

In March the company launched a 32-port all-optical switch, available immediately, and said larger 64-port and 128-port versions would follow. Salience says the switch can improve tokens per second per user in some AI inference workloads by up to 80% and deliver “savings up to 8X on power versus current OEO switching solutions”, meaning switches that convert optical signals to electrical and back.

“Optical switching is moving networks from electronic packet routing to highly predictable, energy-efficient optical connectivity,” Kewada said at the launch. “We are transforming the networking layer, unlocking the ability to extend scale-up and scale-out networks across the datacenter.”

Two days later it announced a collaboration with Keysight Technologies to build the first test environment for optical circuit switches, shown at the OFC conference in Los Angeles. In September it demonstrated a live 64-port switch at the ECOC exhibition in Málaga.

Why it matters to UK buyers

Power is a limiting factor for AI data centers in the UK, and every conversion step in the network draws some of it. A switch that removes transceivers and conversion steps could let operators fit more compute into the same power budget. For data center builders, network equipment makers and the integrators who fit out AI clusters, Salience offers a UK-designed alternative in the network layer.

Kewada has taken Salience from university research to a switch customers can buy, with a manufacturing partner and a test environment in place. The next step is scale: getting the 64-port and 128-port versions into production networks.