optical-networking
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David Friedman Has Spent 30 Years Finding the Bottleneck Before It Becomes Obvious
Before AI data centers ran into a wall of copper, David Friedman had already made a career out of standing where hardware, software and manufacturing collide. His latest act at Lumilens turns a founder’s oldest habit - spotting the constraint early - into an operations job measured in light.
Ashish Vengsarkar Builds Networks Like Crosswords: One Connection at a Time
At Bell Labs, in startups and at Google, he learned to make light carry more of the world’s traffic. Now the nEye.ai CEO is applying three decades of optical-networking lessons to the physical limits of AI.
Mian Zhang
Mian Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of HyperLight, the Cambridge-based deep-tech company commercializing thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics. A Cornell-trained physicist who did his foundational work in Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, Zhang took a notoriously hard-to-manufacture optical material and shrank it onto silicon-style chips - cutting signal loss roughly 100-fold in work published in Nature. HyperLight now runs the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN production line and is pushing 400G-per-lane photonic circuits into hyperscale AI data centers through partnerships with UMC, Wavetek, and Jabil.
Rajiv Ramaswami
Rajiv Ramaswami is the President and CEO of Nutanix, the San Jose-based hybrid multicloud software company. An optical networking PhD who built a 30-year career at IBM Research, Nortel, Cisco, Broadcom and VMware before taking the top job at Nutanix in December 2020, he holds 36 patents and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Todd Swanson
Todd Swanson is the Chief Executive Officer of Proficium, a Union City, California-based company specializing in high-performance optical transceivers, fiber optic cables, and connectivity solutions for hyperscale data centers and AI/ML clusters. With over 30 years in optical networking, he brings deep expertise from Finisar (where he rose to Co-CEO and COO) and Intel (where he led Silicon Photonics as VP/GM). Appointed in August 2024 following Proficium's acquisition by Mill Point Capital, Swanson is steering the company through the AI-driven data center connectivity boom.
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.