Light Links raises $6M to replace radio with infrared for robots and defense

Why it matters

Robots and defense systems need predictable links in places where RF networks can be congested, detected or jammed. Light Links has $6M to prove diffused infrared can work beyond controlled demos.

Firouz Vafadari has raised $6 million in pre-seed funding for Light Links, betting that factories, robot fleets and defense systems will pay to move critical wireless traffic off radio frequencies and onto invisible infrared light.

The Campbell, California-based Light Links disclosed the financing in an August 24th announcement. Outlander led the round, with Anorak Ventures, Output Capital, Mana Ventures and Crosscourt participating. Light Links said it will use the money to scale production and expand industrial automation and defense deployments.

The round gives Vafadari capital to commercialize an idea he had already been pursuing in academia: using light as network infrastructure when conventional wireless connections become congested, detectable or too unpredictable for machines making time-sensitive decisions.

In 2024, while identified by UC Santa Cruz as a second-year computer science and engineering Ph.D. student, Vafadari presented a project called "Connect to the Internet with Light!" at the university's graduate research competition. His work included routing protocols and hybrid radio-frequency and optical networks, supervised by computer networking researchers J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves and Katia Obraczka.

That research helped lead to Wi-OW, the product around which Light Links was founded in 2024. Vafadari's thesis is direct: connected machines are becoming faster and more autonomous, while the wireless networks carrying their instructions still depend on shared radio spectrum and contention between devices.

A room-sized optical network

Wi-OW transmits data through diffused infrared laser light that reflects from walls and ceilings. Light Links says those reflections allow devices to maintain connections when the direct path between transmitter and receiver is blocked, a distinction from conventional point-to-point free-space optical links.

Light Links says Wi-OW uses standard Ethernet connections and components drawn from the fiber-optic supply chain. In the funding announcement, Light Links reports symmetrical throughput of up to 25 Gbps and microsecond-scale round-trip latency. Those figures remain Light Links' performance claims, and the announcement does not provide deployment conditions, distances or measured results behind them.

Light Links also says an unnamed Fortune 50 customer is replacing Wi-Fi with Wi-OW in live operations. The customer's identity, facility type and deployment size are undisclosed, leaving the round's strongest commercial proof point difficult to evaluate. Even so, a production deployment would put Light Links beyond a laboratory demonstration at an unusually early financing stage.

The industrial pitch centers on robot fleets, automated warehouses and factories where wireless delays can interrupt coordinated machines. Light Links says the goal is more predictable performance than a network in which machines compete for airtime.

Defense adds a separate reason to avoid radio. Infrared links do not broadcast an RF signal that can be detected or jammed through conventional radio-frequency methods. Light Links is pitching Wi-OW for RF-silent communications.

Defense investors follow the light

The investor list helps explain why Light Links is emphasizing defense alongside industrial robotics. Outlander's published portfolio includes SpaceX and Scale AI. Anorak says it invests in physical-world technologies including robotics and advanced manufacturing and has previously backed Anduril. Crosscourt lists defense and aerospace holdings including Epirus, Skydio, Hermeus and Ursa Major.

That syndicate gives Vafadari access to investors accustomed to the longer development cycles, hardware requirements and government sales processes that come with dual-use products. It also indicates that Light Links is being evaluated as infrastructure for autonomous systems instead of another attempt to give consumers a faster home internet connection.

Light Links came through Berkeley SkyDeck's Batch 19, where Vafadari appeared alongside Tyler Morton and other technical contributors.

Vafadari has also recruited established optical networking researchers. Light Links lists free-space-optics veteran Heinz Willebrand as CTO and Garcia-Luna-Aceves as chief science officer. The combination pairs Vafadari's academic work with executives who have spent decades on networking and optical communication.

An established category with an unproven distinction

Light Links is entering a market that already includes LiFi and optical-wireless vendors. PureLiFi markets a tactical defense system, room-filling access points and a 10 Gbps architecture. In January 2025, Intelligent Waves and Signify announced a joint venture combining LiFi and free-space optical technologies for government and defense customers.

Light Links' wager rests on its network architecture: reflected, diffused infrared light serving multiple devices indoors without requiring a clear direct path. That design could make optical networking practical in rooms containing moving robots, people and equipment, where tightly aligned optical beams are harder to maintain.

Optical communications still carry environmental constraints. NIST research on conventional free-space optical systems found that beam obscuration from smoke and weather can affect signal strength and integrity. Light Links' indoor reflected-light design addresses a different configuration, although industrial buyers will still care about performance around dust, smoke, moving equipment and changing room layouts.

The $6 million round will fund the part of Vafadari's thesis that matters commercially: whether Wi-OW can reproduce its claimed speed and latency outside controlled demonstrations, across enough devices and difficult enough facilities to justify replacing established Wi-Fi or private 5G infrastructure.

Vafadari has spent several years moving the concept from university research to pilots and production hardware. Light Links now has a defense-heavy investor group willing to finance the next step. The result will be measured on factory floors and contested networks, where a connection that arrives late can be as useful as no connection at all.