France's Lightspring raises over €3.5M to industrialise photonic chip packaging

Lightspring designs and manufactures the optical interfaces of photonic integrated circuits (PICs). By applying 3D lithography directly onto the chip, the company aims to turn photonic packaging into a programmable manufacturing step. It describes its approach as the first 3D-fabricated photonic integration platform.

According to Tech.eu, while PIC fabrication is now handled by a handful of mature foundries, assembly and optical packaging alone account for roughly 50 percent of a PIC's cost, compared with around 20 percent for the foundry step. Fibre-to-chip coupling is still performed part by part through micrometre-scale active alignment, a process that introduces typical optical loss of 2 to 3 dB, low throughput and no standard.

Lightspring was founded in 2026 in Besançon by Grégoire Bonnat, Adrià Grabulosa and Daniel Brunner.

Quentin Calleja, Principal at Atlantic, said that photonics is scaling into AI infrastructure quickly but that optical packaging remains slow and expensive, adding that Lightspring has developed technology that makes it scalable, as reported by EU-Startups.