Aylight closes €4.5M pre-seed round to advance optical interconnect technology

Swiss photonics startup Aylight has raised €4.5 million in a pre-seed funding round to support the development of its chip-scale multiwavelength laser technology. The round was co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures , with participation from Verve Ventures and Plug and Play. Founded in 2025 by Bahareh Marzban and Dmitry Kazakov following research at ETH Zürich, Aylight develops chip-scale multiwavelength lasers for AI data-centre optical interconnects and high-precision frequency-modulated contin