A Spanish startup that spun out of a university lab seven years ago just landed $125 million to help the world’s biggest data centers stop wasting their most expensive hardware.
iPronics, headquartered in Valencia, closed its Series B round on September 2, with Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital co-leading the deal. Nvidia participated alongside other investors, bringing the company’s total funding to $177 million.
What iPronics actually builds
The core product is called the ONE platform, and it does something deceptively simple: it lets data centers physically rewire their internal connections on the fly. Traditional networking gear forces operators to pick a topology and live with it. iPronics uses silicon photonics to create optical circuit switches that can reconfigure in sub-milliseconds.
The practical upside is twofold. First, GPUs spend less time sitting idle waiting for data from other parts of the network. Second, the whole setup draws less power. For hyperscalers deploying hundreds of thousands of computing accelerators in a single facility, even marginal efficiency gains translate into meaningful cost savings.
Perhaps the most striking claim: iPronics says its switches can shrink existing optical circuit switch equipment by roughly 20x. That’s not just a performance upgrade. It’s a physical footprint reduction in facilities where every square foot of rack space is precious real estate.
From Valencia lab to Santa Clara office
iPronics was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from the Technical University of Valencia. The technology draws on optical switching techniques that were previously developed internally at Google, adapted and commercialized for broader deployment.
The company has been shipping its switches for about a year now, working with large (but unnamed) providers in the AI infrastructure space.
Earlier in 2026, iPronics announced a partnership with Fabrinet, the Thailand-based contract manufacturer that handles production for some of the biggest names in optical networking. The deal established a dedicated high-volume packaging and assembly line for silicon photonics components.
Part of the new capital will go toward expanding operations at a new office in Santa Clara. CEO Christian Dupont said the funding will help data centers fully utilize their GPUs without compromising performance.
Why Nvidia is writing checks, not just selling chips
Nvidia’s participation in this round is worth examining on its own. Optical circuit switches that improve GPU utilization fit Nvidia’s thesis of targeting companies that make its own hardware more valuable to end customers. If a data center can squeeze more productive compute out of every Nvidia GPU it buys, the total cost of ownership drops, which makes buying more GPUs an easier decision.
Google has been exploring similar optical switching internally for years, and other startups are chasing variations on the same concept. iPronics’ advantage appears to be the combination of a shipping product, a manufacturing partnership with Fabrinet, and now a war chest large enough to compete for the hyperscaler contracts that will define this market.