Nov 27, 2025 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
Optical data storage company SPhotonix has raised $4.5 million in a pre-seed funding round, led by Creator Fund and XTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of XTX Markets. The funding would allow it to scale up its photonics and engineering teams, expand its R&D efforts across the US and Europe, and support the growing demand for its optics and data storage technology.
Ilya Kazansky said: “Looking at our data storage use cases, in particular as part of current and future cloud solutions for cold and archival storage, the market opportunity is significant. With a 133 percent increase in data generation in the past four years, global data storage capacity is becoming scarce and heavily unsustainable. The cold data storage market is set to top over $400 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research, with our optical data storage solutions leading on new, proven technology to address this enormous need.”
Last year, Peter Kazansky announced that he preserved the human genome (15GB) for billions of years, in a 5D Memory Crystal, and recently stored the entirety of Wikipedia in a small crystal.
“The funding unlocks our ability to recruit world-leading specialists, to innovate through the final TRL stages needed to bring 5D optical to earth and space-borne data centers, picking up on the breakthroughs we’ve recently had with writable and rewritable forms,” Ilya said.
“Furthermore, we can now capture and capitalise on the interest we’ve had to date from hyper scalers and corporate partners in the ecosystems, to create the right partnerships for progression, being announced soon. It’s a really exciting moment in our history.”
