metasurface
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Sam Heidari
Dr. Sam Heidari is the CEO of Lumotive, a Redmond, Washington semiconductor company building programmable, all-silicon lidar chips based on its patented Light Control Metasurface technology. An electrical engineer with a PhD from USC and more than 40 patents, Heidari previously ran Wi-Fi chipmaker Quantenna Communications, taking it from zero revenue to a 2016 IPO and a roughly $1 billion sale to ON Semiconductor in 2019. He now serves on and chairs several technology boards and is turning Lumotive's software-defined optics from a lab breakthrough into mass-produced 3D sensing hardware.
Patrick Bowen
Patrick Bowen is co-founder and CEO of Neurophos, an Austin-based startup building optical AI accelerator chips around metamaterial-based photonic tensor cores. A Duke PhD in electrical engineering and ETH Zurich master's grad, he previously co-founded Metacept with his Duke advisor David Smith. In January 2026 Neurophos closed a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier with Microsoft's M12, Aramco, Bosch and others.
Rob Devlin
Rob Devlin is the co-founder and CEO of Metalenz, the first company to take metasurface optics out of the lab and into mass-market consumer devices. A Harvard-trained applied physicist who studied under Federico Capasso, he turned a Science cover paper into a fabless optical-semiconductor company that prints flat lenses in standard chip foundries. Under his leadership Metalenz shipped the world's first metasurfaces in consumer products with STMicroelectronics in 2022 and launched Polar ID, a polarization-based face authentication system. He keeps the first wafer of 10,000 metasurface lenses on his desk as a reminder of how a single fabrication shot eclipsed an entire PhD's worth of handmade devices.