co-packaged-optics
(3)
Matt Crowley
Matt Crowley is the CEO of SCINTIL Photonics, a fabless silicon-photonics company in Grenoble building single-chip DWDM laser engines for AI data centers. A Princeton-trained physicist who grew up in a family of small-business owners, he spent 25 years turning lab-stage technologies into volume products, founding and exiting two MEMS startups (Sand 9 and Vesper Technologies, the latter acquired by Qualcomm) before taking the helm at Scintil in late 2024. He argues the next bottleneck in AI is the network, not the chip, and is betting that light - not copper - will carry it.
Bardia Pezeshki
Bardia Pezeshki is a serial entrepreneur and photonics pioneer who has spent three decades turning light into bandwidth. As co-founder of Avicena Tech, he is leading the push to replace copper chip-to-chip interconnects with microLED-based optical links - a bet that energy efficiency, not raw speed, is the bottleneck holding back AI infrastructure. With a Stanford PhD in electrical engineering, a prior company (Santur) that moved most of the world's long-distance internet traffic, and a $65M Series B closed in May 2025, Pezeshki is now in the race to wire the AI data center of the future with light.
Vivek Raghunathan
Vivek Raghunathan is the Co-founder and CEO of Xscape Photonics, a silicon photonics startup building multi-color laser technology to solve the bandwidth bottlenecks choking AI data centers. With a PhD from MIT and over 18 years of experience at Intel, Rockley Photonics, and Broadcom, he co-founded Xscape in 2022 alongside four Columbia University photonics researchers. The company has raised ~$95 million in total funding, backed by NVIDIA, Cisco, Addition, and IAG Capital Partners, and launched FalconX, the industry's first fully redundant eight-wavelength external laser module in pluggable form factor.