Lasers All the Way Down
There's a pattern in Tim Jenks's career that only makes sense in hindsight. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate who went to MIT for nuclear engineering, then to Stanford for an MBA - not the usual tech founder profile. He spent the 1990s at Raychem Corporation, a materials engineering company later swallowed by Tyco International. Then NeoPhotonics. Then PowerLight. Three acts, one through-line: he's always been in the business of moving energy from one place to another, with increasing amounts of elegance.
NeoPhotonics was the chapter that defined him publicly. For more than two decades, Jenks ran the Silicon Valley company that specialized in lasers and optoelectronic products - the components that carry 400G and 600G data signals through fiber optic networks connecting hyperscale data centers and telecom infrastructure worldwide. He steered it from venture-backed startup to a 2011 NYSE IPO under ticker NPTN. When Lumentum Holdings came calling with a near-billion-dollar offer in 2021, he closed the deal for approximately $918 million and stepped back.
Most executives in that position retire to board seats and golf. Jenks joined PowerLight Technologies' Board of Advisors in July 2023 - then became its Interim CEO. The company, based in Kent, Washington, does something that sounds like science fiction until you see the numbers: it converts electricity into laser light, transmits that light over long distances, and converts it back into electricity at a receiver. Wireless power. Not the slow, close-range inductive charging your phone uses. Kilowatt-class energy. Across a kilometer. To a drone flying at 5,000 feet.
The Poinsett Range demos prove what we built and set the stage for the roadmap for this capability that scales from a single transmitter to a distributed network, increasing power output, altitude, and range, sustaining multiple aircraft simultaneously across a theater.
- Tim Jenks, CEO, PowerLight Technologies, April 2026In April 2026, PowerLight achieved something no company had before: wireless power beaming to a fielded military unmanned aircraft system in actual flight. Not a lab. Not a tethered test. A Kraus Hamdani Aerospace K1000ULE fixed-wing military drone, flying at Poinsett Electronic Combat Range at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, receiving a kilowatt of laser-delivered power while conducting Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance missions. The receiver weighs six pounds. The implications weigh considerably more.
The program, called PTROL-UAS (Power Transmitted Over Laser to Uncrewed Aircraft Systems), runs under the sponsorship of U.S. Central Command and the Department of Defense's Operational Energy Innovation Directorate. It's backed by up to $7 million in DOD funding across two programs. Jenks frames the technology not just as drone fuel, but as a potential dual-use platform - the same precision beam control that keeps a drone aloft, he notes, has direct applicability to directed energy counter-UAS strategies. In other words: the weapon and the defense against it share a physics engine.
How Laser Power Beaming Works
The system achieves what Jenks calls "infinite flight" for military drones - an aircraft that never needs to land to recharge. The practical implications for persistent surveillance, communications relay, and border security are significant. The military's appetite for long-endurance UAS has collided with the hard limit of battery chemistry; PowerLight is building the workaround.
What makes Jenks's position unusual is the technical depth he brings to a sector where most CEOs lean on the business case. He is a nuclear-power trained naval officer who served on multiple nuclear surface ships - a credential that implies both systems thinking and a very specific relationship with high-stakes energy management. MIT gave him the engineering rigor; Stanford gave him the vocabulary to raise money and execute deals. Raychem gave him manufacturing. NeoPhotonics gave him two decades of operational experience in photonics.
PowerLight is, in some ways, the natural conclusion of that arc. At NeoPhotonics, photons carried information. At PowerLight, photons carry power. Same physics. Different application. Jenks knows the photonics industry well enough to recognize a platform technology when he sees one - and wireless power beaming, if it scales, touches aerospace, defense, telecommunications, space infrastructure, maritime operations, and disaster response.