optical-computing
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Kris Merkel
Kris Merkel is the President and CEO of S2 Corporation, a Bozeman, Montana deep-tech firm turning rare-earth-doped crystals into an optical computer that watches the entire radio spectrum at once. A physicist by training and a patient operator by temperament, he has spent more than two decades pulling a niche piece of laboratory physics, spatial-spectral holography, out of Montana State University and into the hands of the U.S. Department of Defense, DARPA, and the intelligence community.
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.
Nicolas Muller
Nicolas Muller is the co-founder and CEO of Arago, a Paris-based deep-tech startup building a photonic AI accelerator called JEF that uses light instead of transistors to perform AI inference at 10x lower energy than leading GPUs. Coming from a physics and machine learning background - including an ML degree from MIT - Muller co-founded Arago in 2024 alongside Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller. The company raised an oversubscribed $26M seed round in July 2025 backed by Earlybird, Protagonist, Visionaries Tomorrow, and angels from Apple, Datadog, Hugging Face and Arm. Arago's approach - top-down from inference efficiency requirements, not bottom-up from optics research - delivered a working prototype in under 12 months.