iPronics' EIC Accelerator Grant, Then $125M With Nvidia

An application-specific photonic chip is etched for one function, which makes it fast, expensive and useless for anything else. iPronics, a spin-off of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, builds the photonic equivalent of an FPGA: a mesh of waveguides whose light paths can be reprogrammed. The CORDIS summary of its EIC project puts the commercial case in two numbers: using such a device to prototype a photonic design can save 90% of development time and 95% of tape-out costs.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, EXCITE, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance under the smart edge challenge, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,442,502.92 from July 2025 to June 2027 to scale the platform for mass manufacturing and demonstrate it first in data centre switches. It is the company's second EIC Accelerator project, after INSPIRE, which ran from 2022 to 2024. In September 2026 iPronics raised a $125 million Series B.

From a tool for chip designers to a switch for AI clusters

The EIC project describes field-programmable photonic gate arrays as a general-purpose platform, with data centre switches as the first demonstration. The company's public positioning is now entirely that demonstration. Its website sells iPronics ONE, an optical circuit switching platform providing programmable optical connectivity within and across racks, and the problem it describes is specific to AI: GPU domains spanning more racks, copper hitting its scaling limits, network complexity and power rising. The uses listed are high-throughput training, low-latency inference, and redirecting connectivity to a spare GPU when one fails.

The technical validation it publishes is partnership work rather than a customer deployment: with Lumentum it evaluated 1.6 terabit per second transceivers running through the optical circuit switch, reporting near-transparent end-to-end performance under the tested conditions, and it has a partnership with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center on programmable optical networking for AI infrastructure. No named customer or installation has been announced, and CORDIS shows no periodic report.

The round that changes the story

On 2 September 2026 iPronics closed a $125 million Series B co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with Nvidia joining, alongside Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, the EIC Fund, the Tate Family Trust, Fine Structure Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Build Collective and Criteria Venture Tech, as Latham & Watkins recorded in advising the lead investor. Total funding reached $177 million, and the money is for scaling operations, commercial deployment and demand for iPronics ONE, with a new office in Santa Clara.

Two things in that investor list matter for this series. Nvidia's participation is a signal about optical switching in AI clusters that no European grant can manufacture. And the EIC Fund is in the round, which makes iPronics one of the few companies from this cut-off where the equity half of the blended award has visibly arrived.

1. Programmable photonic platformProductisediPronics ONE sold as a rack-mounted switch.
2. Technical evaluation with a partnerReported1.6Tb/s transceiver test with Lumentum, as reported by the company.
3. Investor validation$125MSeries B with Nvidia and the EIC Fund, September 2026.
4. Customer deploymentsNone namedThe site invites architecture briefings and evaluations.

Two grants, then the market

iPronics is a rare case of the EIC funding the same company twice: €2.45 million for INSPIRE in 2022 and €2.44 million for EXCITE in 2025, together about €4.9 million, against $177 million of total funding now. That ratio is the argument for and against this kind of grant at once. The public money came when the technology was a university idea and a prototype; the private money came when AI data centres made optical switching urgent.

A European chip company in the middle of the AI build-out

Optical switching for AI clusters is one of the few parts of the current AI infrastructure boom where European companies have a real technical position, built on photonics research in Valencia, Ghent and elsewhere. The EIC's smart edge challenge funded the manufacturability step, and the result is a Spanish company selling into American hyperscale buildouts with Nvidia on its cap table and an office in Santa Clara. Whether that counts as European industrial success or as a European technology moving to the American market is the question the EIC's own equity stake now rides on.