optical-interconnects
(9)
Ayar Labs
Ayar Labs is a San Jose-based semiconductor company building optical input/output (I/O) technology that moves data between chips using light instead of copper. Its silicon-photonics chiplets - the TeraPHY optical engine and the SuperNova multi-wavelength light source - are designed to be co-packaged directly with GPUs and other processors, letting AI and high-performance-computing systems scale across thousands of accelerators with far higher bandwidth and far lower power than electrical interconnects. Spun out of a DARPA-funded university research effort, the company raised a $500M Series E in 2026 with backing from NVIDIA and AMD.
OpenLight
OpenLight is a Goleta, California silicon photonics company building the world's first open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers. Spun out of Juniper Networks in 2022, it licenses a validated process design kit (PDK) and designs custom PASICs - photonic application-specific integrated circuits - that combine lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors on a single chip for AI data centers, datacom, telecom, LiDAR and quantum computing.
Opticore
Opticore is a photonic computing startup building optical processing units (OPUs) - chips that run AI workloads with light and waveguides instead of electrons. Spun out of research at MIT, USC and UC Berkeley, the company claims its photonic chips are up to 100x more energy efficient and offer roughly 25x the computing density of leading GPUs, using time-multiplexed computing to encode as many as a trillion parameters on a single chip. Opticore has raised about $14.5M to date to attack the energy and 'memory wall' bottlenecks of AI data centers.
SCINTIL Photonics
SCINTIL Photonics is a Grenoble-based, fabless silicon photonics company building the world's first single-chip, DWDM-native laser source for AI data centers. Spun out of CEA-Leti and founded by Sylvie Menezo, its proprietary SHIP (Scintil Heterogeneous Integrated Photonics) process integrates lasers, modulators and detectors onto one manufacturable chip - powering its LEAF Light light engine for co-packaged optics that promises roughly one-sixth the power consumption of conventional pluggable optics. The company raised a $58M Series B in September 2025 with participation from NVIDIA.
Matt Crowley
Matt Crowley is the CEO of SCINTIL Photonics, a fabless silicon-photonics company in Grenoble building single-chip DWDM laser engines for AI data centers. A Princeton-trained physicist who grew up in a family of small-business owners, he spent 25 years turning lab-stage technologies into volume products, founding and exiting two MEMS startups (Sand 9 and Vesper Technologies, the latter acquired by Qualcomm) before taking the helm at Scintil in late 2024. He argues the next bottleneck in AI is the network, not the chip, and is betting that light - not copper - will carry it.
Avicena Tech
Avicena Tech builds LightBundle, a microLED-based optical interconnect that moves data between chips at terabit-per-second densities while sipping sub-picojoules of energy per bit. The Sunnyvale company is betting that the GPU clusters powering AI need a new physical layer - one that copper can't deliver and traditional silicon photonics can't match on power.
Xscape Photonics Inc
Xscape Photonics is a Santa Clara-based deep-tech startup building next-generation silicon photonic solutions to solve the escape bandwidth crisis inside AI data centers. Founded in 2022 by a team of Columbia University researchers and industry veterans, the company's proprietary ChromX platform and FalconX laser module deliver multi-wavelength optical connectivity that can increase data throughput by 10x while cutting power by 10x compared to conventional solutions. Backed by $95 million in total funding from NVIDIA, Cisco, and others, Xscape is building the photonic fabric that will underpin the next generation of agentic AI infrastructure.
Bardia Pezeshki
Bardia Pezeshki is a serial entrepreneur and photonics pioneer who has spent three decades turning light into bandwidth. As co-founder of Avicena Tech, he is leading the push to replace copper chip-to-chip interconnects with microLED-based optical links - a bet that energy efficiency, not raw speed, is the bottleneck holding back AI infrastructure. With a Stanford PhD in electrical engineering, a prior company (Santur) that moved most of the world's long-distance internet traffic, and a $65M Series B closed in May 2025, Pezeshki is now in the race to wire the AI data center of the future with light.
Nicholas Harris
Nicholas Harris is the founder and CEO of Lightmatter, the photonic computing company rewriting the rules of AI infrastructure by replacing copper wires with light. A PhD from MIT's Quantum Photonics Lab, he grew up in the redwood forests of Gasquet, California, and turned years of academic research on programmable nanophotonic processors into a $4.4 billion company that has raised over $850 million from investors including Google Ventures and T. Rowe Price. With 87+ patents, 82 publications in Nature and its family of journals, and recognition as an Optica Fellow and MIT TR35 Innovator, Harris is building what he calls the next Moore's Law - not in transistors, but in optical interconnects.