Robert Bosch Venture Capital leads Scintils’ 13.5 million euro second financing round

Stuttgart, Germany – Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the corporate venture capital company of the Bosch Group, leads the 13.5 million euros second financing round of Scintil Photonics. The company supplies advanced silicon photonic integrated circuits with monolithically integrated lasers and optical amplifiers and is based in Grenoble, France. The groundbreaking integration of laser sources with silicon photonics will fuel a wave of innovations in Optical Communications, 3D Sensing and Quantum Photonics. Bosch develops AI and sensing for Automotive and Industry 4.0 applications where high-speed communication and optical miniaturization is key. The investment is part of RBVC’s fifth fund which was recently set up with a volume of 250 million euros.

“Scintil Photonics is delighted to welcome Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), a leading global investor; this is a great opportunity for us to boost our global footprint. We are also grateful for the support of our first customers, to whom we have shipped or are currently shipping product prototypes, as well as our trusted suppliers and employees,” said Sylvie Menezo, president and CEO of Scintil Photonics. "Together, including the significant contributions in this round from our existing investors, this demonstrates the major progress we have made over the past three years in taking our disruptive photonic circuit technology to the fast-growing market segments of optical interconnects in 5G, Cloud High Performance Computing (HPC) and datacom.”

“Scintil’s monolithic integration of III-V Lasers into silicon photonic chips is a key enabler for next-generation telecom, datacom and sensing,” says Ingo Ramesohl, managing director at RBVC. “The CMOS-compatible process allows for higher design freedom, lower losses and smaller footprint at low cost. We are excited to partner with Scintil as it uniquely unlocks further miniaturization and integration of Photonic Integrated Circuits.”

Set to change the optical I/O and chip industry

Scintil Photonics’ optical communications aim to significantly enhance traditional high-speed electrical chip interconnections. The company’s Augmented Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) product is a single-chip solution consisting of active and passive components, all made entirely from standard silicon photonics processes available at CMOS commercial foundries, and where III-V optical amplifiers and lasers are integrated on the backside of advanced silicon photonic circuits. This unique all-in-one integration of amplifiers and lasers enables ultrahigh-speed communications, due to extensive parallelization and higher bit rates, e.g., from 800 G to 3,200 Gbit/sec with very compact chips.

Scintil Photonics, a fabless company, will use the funds to take its industrialization program to the next level and speed up the global commercialization of its products that boost communications in data centers, High-Performance Computing and 5G networks. Scintil Photonics’ products are unique in providing optical communication applications with higher bit rates, and scalable, cost-effective and mass-producible PIC solutions. This enables the multi-billion USD electronics industry to overcome the end of Moore’s Law with the integration of very high-speed optical communications.