Dive Into the New Age of Light
The Team
Vivek Raghunathan
Co-Founder and CEO
Vivek has over 15 years of experience in silicon photonics. He was a Sr. Principal Engineer, Product Architect and Program Leader for Integrated Silicon Photonics at Broadcom driving key core technology development required to co-package optics with switches and demonstrated industry’s first 25.6T Ethernet switch co-packaged with silicon photonics chiplets. Prior to joining Broadcom, he was a Principal Engineer at Rockley Photonics where he led silicon photonics product integration for their data-com product line. He started his career at Intel where he led next generation GPU to HBM interconnect technology development and the commercialization of their first Silicon-photonics-based transceivers. He received his PhD from MIT in Material Science and Engineering.
Alexander Gaeta
Co-Founder and President
Alex is a world leader in quantum and nonlinear photonics. He performed many of the key demonstrations of nonlinear optical devices in silicon photonics, including parametric amplifiers and optical frequency comb generators. He also holds appointments in the departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He was awarded the Townes Medal in 2019 and is a Fellow of Optica, the American Physical Society, and IEEE.
Yoshi Okawachi
Co-Founder and Head of R&D - Laser
Yoshi has over 10 years of research expertise in silicon photonics and optical frequency combs. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed journal papers and is a co-inventor on 6 patents. He is a Fellow of Optica, the 2017 Optica Ambassador, and is the recipient of the 2017 Tingye Li Innovation Price. He received his PhD from Cornell University in Applied Physics.
Nicolas Herriau
VP Product Management and Strategy
Nicolas has over 25 years of experience in the photonics space. He joins Xscape from Lumentum where he was the General Manager of its Datacom business unit after serving as the Vice President of Strategy. In prior roles, he spent 16 years at NeoPhotonics as Director of Product engineering and General Manager of the Transceiver business unit serving the Hyperscale Cloud Datacenters. He started his career as Principal Engineer at Dicon Fiberoptics then Lightconnect with focus on integrating Optical and MEMS technologies.
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Nicolas received a Master of Science in Physics/Optics from Paris-Sud University and an Executive MBA from Northwestern - Kellogg School of Management.
Ramesh Senthinathan
VP of Engineering
Ramesh has greater than 30 years of experience in IC development. He joins Xscape from Lumentum where he was VP of IC development. In prior roles, Ramesh held various executive positions including VP of
engineering at Broadcom, Marvell, Intel, Quantenna Communications and a Fellow
and Distinguish Engineer. Ramesh has published more than 75-refereed papers, 23 patents, a book.
Ramesh received his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of
Arizona, and his BS degree in Computer Sciences from University of Buffalo
Karthik Vaithianathan
Head of AI Systems Architecture
Karthik Vaithianathan has over 24 years of experience defining and implementing SoCs, Accelerators, Systems, and
Software for various applications including General-Purpose (x86) Computing, Video Signal Processing, Computer
Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and Large Language Models (LLMs). In his recent role as an
entrepreneur, he defined and launched a distributed edge computing framework called Garuda REAP for LLM
inference and training. Before that as a Lead SoC architect at Intel Corporation, Karthik was responsible for the
architecture definition/performance of four SoCs/Accelerators including Skylake Accelerated Compute Extension
(ACE). Karthik has 10 approved patents, 10 patent publications, and over 12 published papers. Karthik received his
MS in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University at Tempe, and a B.S. in Electronics and Communication
Engineering from Guindy College of Engineering at Chennai, India.
Asher Novick
Senior Silicon Photonics R&D Engineer
Asher has over 6 years of combined work experience in fiber optics and silicon photonics R&D and is the co-author of over 60 conference, journal, and patent publications in the field of optical communication and connectivity. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, leading the first-ever integrated Kerr comb-driven silicon photonic transmitter demonstration as a part of his work on silicon photonic interconnects and devices. Prior to Columbia University, Asher worked in Panduit’s Fiber R&D Lab, developing innovative optical solutions for customers’ data center and enterprise connectivity needs.
Andres Gil Molina
Senior Photonics Engineer
Andres has more than 10 years of research experience in laser integration, nonlinear optics, Silicon photonics, and optical communications. He has co-authored over 30 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and co-invented 3 patents. He worked as a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, where he led the development of a novel high-power electrically-pumped microcomb sources. Andres earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas.
Maarten Hattink
Silicon Photonics Systems and Control Design Engineer
Maarten has over 8 years of experience working with optical and electronic systems. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University where he developed control systems for optical circuits and coordinated the development of integrated photonic transceiver prototypes. Prior to studying at Columbia University, Maarten worked at Prodrive Technologies, developing software and FPGAs for electronic test automation.
Ferdinand Mendoza
Principal Mechanical Engineer
Ferdinand has 10 years of experience designing data center equipment and optical communications products at Lumentum, Infinera, and Cerebras Systems. He received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from San Jose State University.
Michal Lipson
Co-Founder
Michal is a pioneer of silicon photonics. Several of her innovations are currently standard offerings in photonic foundries around the world, including microring modulators and nanotaper couplers. She is a co-founder of Voyant Photonics and sits on the Board of Poet Technologies. She holds appointments in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Columbia University. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.
Keren Bergman
Co-Founder
Keren is a world leader on photonic interconnect architectures. Her work is foundational to reducing energy consumption in computing with optical data movement. Keren holds a faculty appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.
Board of Advisors
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Paul Negus
High Volume Operations & Organizational Development
Paul Negus brings with him over 30 years of management and business development specializing in technology startups in new and emerging markets. His expertise in forecasting, budgeting, restructuring, outsourcing, global contract negotiations, and profit and loss served him in revitalizing operations and delivering growth for a number of global organizations.
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A versatile, resourceful leader, Negus has held a variety of leadership roles throughout his career, including Vice President in the Data Center Group and the general manager of Connectivity Group Engineering and Operations at Intel Corporation, vice president of operations at LightWire Inc., prior to and after its acquisition by Cisco Systems; Vice President of global operations at Gemfire Corporation; vice president of operations and customer service at ONStor, Inc.; Vice President of worldwide operations at Avanex Corporation, Inc.; and Vice President and general manager of operations at IOA Corporation (now Clerios, Inc.).
Tanj (John G.) Bennett
Tanj started his computing career in the UK with a degree in math, working on automatic test, digital simulation, wafer scale CMOS memory, distributed operating systems, networking, device drivers, and various office applications.
He worked at Borland in California on run time libraries for Pascal, C and C++, various utilities supporting Borland compilers, and the Quattro and Quattro Pro spreadsheet applications. He was the architect and engineering lead for Paradox for Windows.
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At Microsoft he worked on object databases, just-in time code generation for mobile computers, large scale mathematical optimization, an experimental secure OS, and early foundations for HoloLens. He was the architect for Bing search engine until 2015, and hardware architect for Azure server systems until 2020.
Tanj has consulted on data center architecture, memory, error correction, and energy-efficient interconnects. His current projects include low energy chip design and electron beam lithography.Tanj has more than 50 publications and patents in hardware, software, and biology.
Data Center Architecture and Energy Efficient Interconnects
Dylan Patel
Industry Voices & Market Analysis
Dylan Patel is the founder and Chief Analyst of SemiAnalysis, a boutique semiconductor, datacenter, and AI consulting and research firm. He has experience in both deep learning as well as the semiconductor industry and is focused on the unique requirements of AI hardware, software, infrastructure, and costs associated with running various types of models.