SUBPHOTON
Founded in 2019 by professionals with decades of experience in the field of submarine systems, Subphoton has a team with specific expertise that has enabled it to develop high-performance optical amplifiers based on two different technologies that allow it to increase the signal traveling in cables to the bottom of the ocean depths, guaranteeing greater efficiency and an increase in the amount of data transmitted per single cable.
A performance improvement that is unmatched by the current state of the art and has attracted the interest of some Hyperscalers, among the leaders of the global digital economy such as Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft who alone own or lease more than half of the global submarine bandwidth. In less than a decade, in fact, these players have transformed themselves from capacity buyers to direct owners of network assets in order to achieve better performance, reliability, and flexibility and thus be able to support the soaring increase in demand for services.
Subphoton’s technology value proposition precisely addresses specific needs and was immediately welcomed by some of these top players, who recognized the startup’s capability and have already entered into advanced negotiations for ad hoc activities as part of already planned massive investment programs.
For LIFTT, Subphoton is a strategic investment because it represents a “unicum” both because the technology they have developed is superior to any standard currently available and because of their ability to intercept the needs of a market in which investments of several billion euros have already been planned over the next few years: for example, at least 100,000 km of new cables are laid each year, with routes and logics that are also very different from the original ones that date back to the second half of the last century.
Round
LIFTT Investment
In portfolio: Q3 2022
Venture phase: Start-up
