Vivek
Raghunathan

The man who decided light moves data better than electrons

Most people who work in the guts of semiconductor manufacturing for nearly two decades settle into a comfortable groove - they know which meetings to skip, which roadmaps to trust, and which promises the industry quietly abandons. Vivek Raghunathan did not settle. In 2022, after stints at Intel, Rockley Photonics, and Broadcom, he walked away from the senior-engineer track and co-founded Xscape Photonics, a bet that multi-color laser technology is the only real path through the wall that AI is about to run into.

The premise is not subtle. Every GPU cluster on the planet has a bandwidth problem. The chips can compute far faster than the network around them can move data. Existing interconnects - copper wires and even single-wavelength optical links - simply cannot scale at the rate AI hardware demands. Raghunathan's answer is to bounce multiple simultaneous wavelengths of light through a single fiber: not one color, but eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, scaling toward 128 and beyond. Each wavelength is an independent data lane. When you multiply them, you get the kind of bandwidth step-change that fixes the problem rather than patches it.

The company he built around that idea, Xscape Photonics, has now raised approximately $95 million in total funding - $44 million in its Series A in October 2024 from IAG Capital Partners, NVIDIA, Cisco, Altair, Fathom Fund, Kyra Ventures, LifeX Ventures, and OUP, then a $37 million Series A extension in March 2026 led by Addition. The March 2026 round doubled the company's valuation, though Xscape has not disclosed the number.

From Intel's first photonics transceiver to co-packaged optics at Broadcom

Raghunathan's career before Xscape reads like a map of silicon photonics' commercial history. He earned his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT and began his professional life at Intel, where he led next-generation GPU-to-HBM interconnect technology and helped commercialize Intel's first silicon photonics-based transceivers. That was before "silicon photonics" was a phrase that showed up in investor decks.

From Intel he moved to Rockley Photonics as a Principal Engineer, leading silicon photonics product integration for their data-com product line. Then Broadcom, where he spent years as Sr. Principal Engineer, Product Architect, and Program Leader for Integrated Silicon Photonics. His biggest milestone there: helping demonstrate the industry's first 25.6T Ethernet switch co-packaged with silicon photonics chiplets - a proof point that co-packaged optics could actually work at production scale.

Raghunathan describes the decision to leave as a pull, not a push. He had visited Columbia University's comb research laboratories - where co-founders Alexander Gaeta, Michal Lipson, Keren Bergman, and Yoshi Okawachi were doing foundational photonics work - and concluded that the timing was exactly right to translate that research into real products. He wanted, as he put it, to "build something new from the ground up that was valuable to end users," rather than executing someone else's roadmap inside a large organization.

ChromX, FalconX, and the roadmap to 128 colors

The ChromX platform is Xscape's core intellectual property: a programmable, multi-color photonics architecture for AI data center fabric connectivity. FalconX, launched in March 2026, is the first commercial product built on it - an External Laser Small Form-factor Pluggable (ELSFP) device that generates up to eight simultaneous wavelengths of light from a single module, delivering more than 1 watt of optical power. It uses the company's proprietary CombX laser technology to generate those wavelengths on a silicon photonics chip.

The vision Raghunathan articulates goes significantly further than eight wavelengths. The ChromX roadmap targets 16, 32, and eventually 128+ wavelengths per module, each carrying independent data streams. At 128 wavelengths, a single fiber link could support data rates that would let disparate GPU clusters - or entire data centers in different locations - operate with the latency and bandwidth characteristics of a single machine.

Building culture before building the product

One pattern that comes through consistently in Raghunathan's public statements is an unusual level of deliberateness about organizational culture - unusual, that is, for a founder who is simultaneously a technical architect at the cutting edge of photonics. He describes watching large organizations inherit culture by accident, letting it form by default rather than by design, and decided that Xscape would not do that.

"I wanted to build a team and a culture deliberately from day one," he has said - "a culture defined by curiosity, agility, and passion for solving customer problems." That framing says something about how he thinks about company-building: the culture is not a soft byproduct of the work, it is a structural asset, as designed and loadbearing as the ChromX platform itself.

Xscape's team of roughly 52 people spans the gap between deep academic research and hard commercial engineering. The co-founding team - photonics researchers from Columbia who had spent careers publishing foundational results - had to be convinced that the work they'd done in labs could be built into something deployable at scale. Raghunathan's industry background was precisely what bridged that gap.

• Raised ~$95M from NVIDIA, Cisco, Addition, and IAG Capital Partners - among the largest deep-tech photonics rounds on record
• Launched FalconX: the industry's first fully redundant, 8-wavelength External Laser Small Form-factor Pluggable (ELSFP) device
• Helped demonstrate the industry's first 25.6T Ethernet switch co-packaged with silicon photonics chiplets at Broadcom
• Commercialized Intel's first silicon photonics-based transceivers
• Co-developed (with Tower Semiconductor) the first monolithically integrated multi-color laser source on-chip
• Built the ChromX platform: a programmable multi-color photonics architecture targeting 128+ wavelengths per link
• 18+ years advancing silicon photonics from prototype to production across three major semiconductor firms