Yichen Shen

Yichen Shen is the founder and CEO of Lightelligence, an MIT spinout building computers that run on light instead of electricity. A physicist who earned his PhD at MIT in 2016, Shen co-authored a landmark 2017 Nature Photonics paper showing that deep-learning math could be done with interfering photons, then turned the idea into chips. His company has shipped photonic processors (PACE), the first optical network-on-chip (Hummingbird), and optical interconnects (Photowave), and in 2026 became the first AI photonic-computing company to go public.