Lightspring Closes €3.1M to Scale Photonic Packaging

The big picture: French company Lightspring today announced the close of a €3.1 million seed round led by Atlantic and OVNI Capital, with participation from Concept Ventures, Ixcore, Plug and Play Ventures, and industry business angels. The company also secured a €350,000 i-Lab grant, bringing its total dilutive and non-dilutive financing to over €3.5 million.

Why it matters:

• AI infrastructure demands: Every new generation of AI compute pushes optical interfaces closer to the chip, creating a critical need for scalable and efficient photonic packaging solutions.
• Costly bottleneck: Optical packaging remains the most expensive and least reproducible step in photonic integrated circuit (PIC) manufacturing, accounting for roughly 50% of a PIC’s cost.
• Inefficient alignment: Current fibre-to-chip coupling relies on manual, micrometre-scale active alignment, leading to high optical loss, low throughput, and degraded yield.

How it works:

• Direct on-chip fabrication: Lightspring uses 3D lithography (two-photon polymerisation) to fabricate optical coupling structures like microlenses and waveguides directly onto the photonic chip.
• Single-step process: This approach aims to eliminate the need for precision pre-alignment, targeting coupling losses below 0.5 dB per interface and significantly reducing manufacturing complexity.
• Software-driven design: The company’s core intellectual property includes the first Process Design Kit (PDK) dedicated to 3D optical coupling, paired with software-driven design tools and qualified fabrication recipes.

The catch: While Lightspring’s technology promises to industrialize a critical bottleneck, the deeptech photonics sector is highly competitive and capital-intensive. Scaling from lab results to qualified industrial production will require significant investment and successful co-design programs with industrial partners in a market that is global from day one.

Key Facts

• Company: Lightspring
• Amount: €3.1M
• Round: Seed
• Investors: Atlantic and OVNI Capital (co-lead), Concept Ventures, Ixcore, Plug and Play Ventures
• Founders: Grégoire Bonnat, Daniel Brunner
• Announced: 2026-09-22
• Sector: Photonic Integrated Circuits
• Headquarters: Besançon, France