ETH Zurich spinout raises €4.5M to fix AI data centers' laser bottleneck
Aylight, co-founded and led by CEO Bahareh Marzban, raised a €4.5 million pre-seed round to build chip-scale lasers that could ease a growing hardware shortage in AI infrastructure.
Zurich-based Aylight has closed a €4.5 million pre-seed round, co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures, to develop chip-scale multiwavelength lasers for AI data centers. The company was founded in 2025 by CEO Bahareh Marzban and CTO Dmitry Kazakov, growing out of research at ETH Zürich.
The core idea: a single Aylight device can emit multiple precisely spaced wavelengths of light, replacing dozens of discrete lasers used today in optical interconnects – the links that move data between servers at the speed AI training demands. That matters because laser supply has become a real constraint on how fast data centers can scale.
The laser had become one of the real limits on how far AI can scale.
That's Marzban's framing for why Aylight exists: not a software optimization, but a hardware physics problem that nobody had fully solved. It's a rare deep-tech, hardware-first story in a funding environment dominated by AI software.