Lightspring, a Besançon, France-based photonics startup, has closed a €3.1 million seed round led by Atlantic and OVNI Capital. Concept Ventures, IXCORE, Plug and Play Ventures and industry business angels also participated in the financing.
The company has also secured a €350,000 grant after being named a laureate of i-Lab, France’s national deeptech innovation competition. Together with the seed round and additional public innovation funding, Lightspring has secured more than €3.5 million in dilutive and non-dilutive financing.
Lightspring develops optical interfaces for photonic integrated circuits using 3D lithography. Its technology is designed to fabricate optical coupling structures directly on photonic chips, including applications in fibre-to-chip and chip-to-chip interconnections. The company is developing a Process Design Kit and related software-driven design tools for 3D optical coupling.
Lightspring is led by co-founders Grégoire Bonnat, Adrià Grabulosa and Daniel Brunner. The technology originated from research at the FEMTO-ST Institute in Besançon, where Brunner is a CNRS researcher.
The company plans to use the financing to develop its Process Design Kit and design tools, expand its team in areas including microfabrication and photonic circuit design, work with industrial partners, and scale and qualify its fabrication process for industrial applications.
