optical-interconnect
(2)
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.
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.