Photonics in NL: from science to commercial opportunity
April's investment is Astrape. This startup is reinventing data center infrastructure with a groundbreaking optical switch.
Published on May 9, 2025
The Astrape founding team in 2023; Francesco Pessolano on the right.
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Rebuilding one of our time's most critical digital infrastructures. That’s precisely what Astrape is doing—and with €7.9 million in funding, they’re well on their way. Born out of Eindhoven’s HighTechXL venture builder in 2022, Astrape is tackling the increasing inefficiency of data centres head-on with a radically new kind of optical switch. We sat down with CEO and founder Francesco Pessolano—an Italian engineer with roots in Philips’ legendary NatLab—to talk about the journey and what lies ahead.
From deeptech to a real-world product
Astrape’s origin story is classic Eindhoven: photonics, semiconductors, and a healthy dose of venture building. The company began when Francesco and co-founder Willem Jan Withagen examined a piece of cutting-edge photonic technology emerging from NXP and PhotonDelta ecosystems, developed in the group of Prof. Nicola Calabretta at TU/e. The question wasn’t can it work, but where can it be useful?
“We had a promising piece of tech, but no clear application,” Pessolano recalls. “Then we started asking: how can this solve a real problem in the market?” By summer 2022, Withagen joined the founding team. By spring 2023, Astrape had secured its first round of investment—and more importantly, its first full-time team members. Today, the team is 17 firm, with plans to scale up to 60–80 people within two years. “It’s exciting, but at times it can also be somewhat overwhelming,” he admits. “We’re moving very fast.”
Reinventing the switch
So what exactly does Astrape do? In short, it builds a smarter switch for data centres—one that uses optics to handle the growing server-to-server communication demands brought on by AI.
“Before AI, servers didn’t talk to each other much,” Pessolano explains. “Now, models are trained in parallel across hundreds of servers. That requires high-throughput, low-latency communication, and the traditional network architecture just can’t keep up.”
Astrape’s solution is deceptively simple: instead of routing traffic through multiple switches, why not build a direct, dynamic optical link between the communicating servers? Think of it as a virtual cable that forms when two servers need to talk, and disappears when they don’t.
But don’t be fooled by the simplicity. Astrape’s technology is special because its optical switch behaves like any standard switch, which integrates easily into existing infrastructure. “We make a box,” says Pessolano. “Not a service, not a system integrator. Just a box that data centres can install and use like any other.”
A photonic push
The €7.9M raised—co-led by PhotonVentures, Join Capital, and Brabant Development Agency (BOM), with participation from Shift Invest—will accelerate product development, miniaturisation, and team growth. Astrape recently completed a prototype and is now aiming to shrink it to the size of two pizza boxes before launching pilot programs in 2026. Commercial samples are targeted for 2027, with a public launch planned for 2028.
But there's a catch: talent. “We’re becoming more vertically integrated than we originally planned,” the entrepreneur notes. “And that means we need experts across photonics, supply chain, software integration—you name it.”
Finding the right photonics engineers has been particularly tough. “In Europe, especially in the Netherlands, people still see photonics as a research field. But we need to move beyond that. We’re building a product, not a paper. It is a challenge to build a strong photonic team with the right mindset.”
His call is clear: “Photonic engineers, please come talk to us, especially if you're in the Netherlands. This is your chance to make something real.”
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Grounded in Eindhoven with a global vision
While Astrape is building its team in the Netherlands, its global commercial ambitions are focused on North America, where roughly half of the world’s data centres are located. “Our target market is very concentrated,” Pessolano says. “Only a few hundred major companies are operating large-scale data centres. The majority are in the US.”
That also means navigating geopolitics and supply chain complexity. “Initially, we designed a globally distributed supply chain to avoid tariffs and reduce risk. But things are changing fast. Who knows what the world will look like in 2027?”
Astrape’s mission—and Pessolano’s mission—succeeds when customers come back to repurchase its product. Looking ahead five years, the vision is clear: a commercially available photonic switch that redefines how data centres operate. And a company headquartered in the Netherlands, with a world-class photonics team to make it all possible.