optical-interconnect
(6)
Accelight Technologies, Inc.
Accelight Technologies (ATI) is an ISO-certified ODM founded in 2017 that designs and manufactures high-speed optical connectivity products - transceiver modules from 100G to 1.6T, active optical and electrical cables, passive optical modules, and optical amplifiers - for hyperscale data centers, AI computing infrastructure, and telecom carriers. With R&D centers in Wuhan Optics Valley and Silicon Valley and manufacturing in China and Thailand, ATI positions itself as a supply-chain-secure alternative for cloud and AI networking optics.
Cspeed
Cspeed is a Palo Alto optical semiconductor startup building silicon photonics and high-density III-V laser array technology to replace copper interconnects inside large-scale AI clusters. Founded in 2022 and led by serial semiconductor entrepreneur Sanjai Kohli, the company targets the data-movement bottlenecks that limit 'scale-up' AI infrastructure, aiming to deliver fiber-optic connectivity dense and cheap enough for high-volume datacenter deployment.
nEye.ai
nEye.ai (nEye Systems) is a Santa Clara semiconductor company building optical circuit switches (OCS) on a single chip. By fusing MEMS with silicon photonics and CMOS at wafer scale, its flagship SuperSwitch aims to move data between thousands of GPUs, CPUs and memory units with far less power and space than conventional electrical switching. Founded in 2020 by UC Berkeley photonics researchers and led by telecom-optics veteran Ashish Vengsarkar, the company raised an $80M Series C in April 2026, bringing total funding to about $152.5M as it scales foundry-based manufacturing for AI data centers.
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.
Lightelligence
Lightelligence builds photonic and optoelectronic hybrid computing hardware that moves and processes AI data with light instead of electrons. Spun out of MIT in 2017 on the back of a landmark Nature Photonics paper, the company designs silicon-photonics chips, optical interconnects, and AI accelerators aimed at the bandwidth and energy bottlenecks of modern data centers. In April 2026 it listed in Hong Kong as the world's first AI silicon-photonics chip stock, jumping roughly 400% on debut.
Vivek Raghunathan
Vivek Raghunathan is the Co-founder and CEO of Xscape Photonics, a silicon photonics startup building multi-color laser technology to solve the bandwidth bottlenecks choking AI data centers. With a PhD from MIT and over 18 years of experience at Intel, Rockley Photonics, and Broadcom, he co-founded Xscape in 2022 alongside four Columbia University photonics researchers. The company has raised ~$95 million in total funding, backed by NVIDIA, Cisco, Addition, and IAG Capital Partners, and launched FalconX, the industry's first fully redundant eight-wavelength external laser module in pluggable form factor.