optical-interconnects
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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.
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.