optical-communications
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Rafik Ward and the Strategy of Light
Before AI made optics fashionable, Rafik Ward had already spent two decades translating tiny components into big strategic bets. At Lumentum, he is now helping decide where light goes next.
Adam Carter Is Turning a Photonics Lab Bet Into an Open Chip Business
After three decades selling the plumbing of the internet, Adam Carter is making a quieter bet: the next wave of AI infrastructure will be built by letting more companies put light directly on silicon.
Sanjai Parthasarathi
An engineer who learned to market complexity, Sanjai Parthasarathi has spent three decades turning invisible technologies into a story customers, investors, and colleagues can act on.
Dave Welch
Dave Welch is the founder and CEO of AttoTude, a Menlo Park deep-tech startup building the world's first terahertz interconnect that runs over wire instead of fiber or photonics, aimed at unclogging the data-movement bottleneck inside AI and hyperscale data centers. A co-founder of Infinera, where he pioneered large-scale photonic integrated circuits, and former CTO at SDL, Welch holds more than 200 patents, has authored roughly 300 publications, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In April 2025 AttoTude raised a $50M Series B, pushing total funding past $90M.
Mohammad Noshad
Mohammad Noshad is Co-Founder and CEO of Shyld AI, the company behind the world's first AI-driven autonomous UV-C disinfection system for hospitals. A Harvard-trained researcher with a PhD from the University of Virginia, Noshad pivoted from academic work in signal processing and optical communications to building technology that attacks the $50+ billion annual problem of hospital-acquired infections. Shyld AI's ceiling-mounted devices use multimodal sensors and edge AI to autonomously identify contaminated surfaces and inactivate pathogens - killing MRSA in 10 seconds from 6.5 feet away - with pilots running at Stanford Health Care and Loma Linda University Medical Center. Noshad is also co-founder of Wodio.AI and a Strategic Advisor at Field AI.