Ciena buys Politecnico spinout PhotonPath after $9.7M in backing
What's the deal? US-listed telecoms firm Ciena has acquired PhotonPathDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an Italian deep tech startup spun out of the Politecnico di Milano in 2019. Terms were undisclosed. Ciena, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, builds hardware, software, and services for telecoms networks and high-speed connectivity.
Why it matters: PhotonPath's backers — 360 Capital, Join CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Deep Ocean Capital, Levante CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, BremboDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and CDP Venture CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → — supported it across four rounds between 2019 and 2025, totalling €8.3 million. Exits remain scarce in Italy's venture ecosystem, so a cash return counts.
The numbers: In 2025, Italy recorded 31 M&A deals but no IPOs, and exit activity stayed modest outside a handful of large transactions. As Fabio Mondini de Focatiis of Growth CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → put it, "the exit bottleneck remains the main critical factor for the Italian VC ecosystem."
In their words: Francesco Lorenzini, general partner at Levante Capital, said the deal means "returned capital" for investors. His stated aim was to back European industrial-technology firms built to "enter global value chains," not just become local champions.
What's the endgame? PhotonPath grew from Italian public research, scaled on Italian and European capital, and built photonics technology valuable enough for a major American network-infrastructure player to buy. That is the model Lorenzini described — and it worked.
The signal: The exit is bittersweet. Italy keeps producing quality deep tech from technology transfer, but when the moment to scale arrives, the buyer is again foreign, usually American. In fields like photonics, semiconductors, and quantum — increasingly strategic industrial assets — the question is whether Italy can grow these firms into European champions rather than sell them early.
Image credit: IBM Research
