Avicena Tech builds LightBundle, a microLED-based optical interconnect that moves data between chips at terabit-per-second densities while sipping sub-picojoules of energy per bit. The Sunnyvale company is betting that the GPU clusters powering AI need a new physical layer - one that copper can't deliver and traditional silicon photonics can't match on power.
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.