photonic-computing
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Patrick Bowen
Patrick Bowen is co-founder and CEO of Neurophos, an Austin-based startup building optical AI accelerator chips around metamaterial-based photonic tensor cores. A Duke PhD in electrical engineering and ETH Zurich master's grad, he previously co-founded Metacept with his Duke advisor David Smith. In January 2026 Neurophos closed a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier with Microsoft's M12, Aramco, Bosch and others.
Zaijun Chen
Zaijun Chen is a physicist-turned-founder building light-powered computers for artificial intelligence. As co-founder and CEO of Opticore, he is developing photonic optical processing units (OPUs) that the company says are up to 100x more energy efficient and 25x denser than leading GPUs. Trained at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and MIT, and now director of the Laboratory of Intelligent and Quantum Photonics at USC, Chen turned a decade of precision-optics research into a venture-backed bet that the future of AI compute runs on photons instead of electrons.
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.
Nicolas Muller
Nicolas Muller is the co-founder and CEO of Arago, a Paris-based deep-tech startup building a photonic AI accelerator called JEF that uses light instead of transistors to perform AI inference at 10x lower energy than leading GPUs. Coming from a physics and machine learning background - including an ML degree from MIT - Muller co-founded Arago in 2024 alongside Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller. The company raised an oversubscribed $26M seed round in July 2025 backed by Earlybird, Protagonist, Visionaries Tomorrow, and angels from Apple, Datadog, Hugging Face and Arm. Arago's approach - top-down from inference efficiency requirements, not bottom-up from optics research - delivered a working prototype in under 12 months.
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.