Pisa-based CamGraPhIC, the research arm of 2D Photonics, has been given approval by the European Commission for €211 million in funding by the Italian State to build a new class of optical technology designed to address how data moves inside advanced computing systems.
Today’s announcement will reportedly be one of the largest single public investments ever made in an Italian DeepTech startup – placing the company among a small group of companies globally working to redefine how data is moved inside future AI infrastructure
“This investment goes straight to the heart of what’s limiting AI today,” says Ben Jensen, CEO of 2D Photonics. “Compute keeps getting faster, but data movement hasn’t kept pace. Graphene-based optical technology offers a way to move vastly more data using far less power, which is exactly what the next generation of AI systems will require.”
CamGraPhIC’s state-backed package stands out against a broader run of photonics and adjacent AI-infrastructure funding rounds that have generally been much smaller:
- France: Scintil Photonics raised €50 million to scale integrated photonics for AI factories; Arago raised €22.1 million to commercialise its photonic AI processor.
- UK: Oxford-based Lumai secured more than €9.2 million to advance optical AI accelerator technology; and Leeds-based Optalysys raised €26.4 million to commercialise photonic chips using light.
- Germany’s Q.ANT secured €62 million to commercialise photonic processors for AI and high-performance computing.
Taken together, those comparable rounds amount to almost €170 million, which means CamGraPhIC’s package on its own is larger than that sample combined, underlining the scale of public support now being directed towards photonics-based computing, optical interconnects and other light-based approaches to reducing AI-era bandwidth and energy bottlenecks.
Founded in 2018 as a spinout from the Cambridge Graphene Centre (CGC), CamGraPhIC is developing graphene-based optical interconnect solutions for advanced computing applications. As part of the 2D Photonics SpA group, the company focuses on enabling next-generation data communication technologies for AI, data centres, and high-performance computing.
2D photonics delivers simplified designs with improved bandwidth density and energy efficiency for telecom, datacom and high-performance computing applications. The company raised €25 million in its Series A round in February 2025.
By using graphene, a material with exceptional electronic and optical properties, CamGraPhIC’s approach looks to enable a large increase in bandwidth density, while delivering lower latency and significantly lower energy consumption compared to the best silicon photonics available today, directly addressing one of the biggest obstacles to scaling AI and high-performance computing.
According to the company, today’s AI systems are no longer held back by a lack of computing power. Instead, performance is increasingly constrained by the flow of data between chips, accelerators, and memory. As models grow larger and hardware becomes more dense, existing electrical and silicon photonic interconnects struggle to keep up, consuming more power, generating more heat, and slowing systems down.
“The measure approval allows us to move quickly from innovation to execution,” Marco Romagnoli, Co-founder and CSO added. “By building manufacturing capability alongside the technology, we’re laying the groundwork for graphene photonics to become a practical part of future AI systems, not just a research promise.”
The funding, under the European Commission’s State Aid Framework for research and development and innovation, will be used to industrialise CamGraPhIC’s optical interconnect platform for deployment in AI accelerators, high-performance computing systems, and advanced data centres, where bandwidth density and energy efficiency have become critical bottlenecks.
A key pillar of the project is the construction of a pilot manufacturing facility near Milan, designed to take graphene photonics from advanced research into real-world production. The facility will support device qualification, early manufacturing runs, and eventual transfer to high-volume foundry processes, creating a direct pathway from lab to large-scale deployment.
The project is expected to create over 150 highly skilled jobs across photonics engineering, materials science, and semiconductor manufacturing. The pilot line is scheduled to become operational in 2028 enabling early engagement with system integrators and computing platform providers.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/04/camgraphic-lands-e211-million-to-tackle-ais-data-bottleneck-in-one-of-italys-largest-deeptech-funding-deals/
