Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Aug 5, 2026
Lightmatter is a private photonics and semiconductor company building photonic infrastructure for AI-scale data centers. It uses silicon photonics to replace electrical interconnect bottlenecks with higher-bandwidth, lower-power optical links.
Primary product
Passage® photonic interconnect platform, complemented by Guide® VLSP (Very Large Scale Photonics) external light engines. Passage spans near-/on-/co-packaged optics and 3D photonic interposers; products are offered to early-access and design partners.
Founded
2017
Headquarters
Mountain View, California, United States
Team size
201–500
Work style
Hybrid
Industry
Computer hardware manufacturing
Sub-industry
Silicon photonics, optical interconnects, co-packaged optics, and AI infrastructure semiconductors
Offices
Business model
Stage
Series D / late-stage private company
Total raised
$850M
Latest round
Series D · Oct 2024
Latest amount
$400M
Oct 2024 · T. Rowe Price Associates
Jan 2024 · SIP Global Partners
Dec 2023 · GV and Viking Global Investors
May 2023 · SIP Global Partners and Aliya
May 2021 · Viking Global Investors
Feb 2019 · GV
May 2017
Leadership
Founder and CEO
Darius Bunandar
Founder and Chief Scientist
Thomas Graham
Founder and Head of Machine Learning
Simona Jankowski
Chief Financial Officer
Ritesh Jain
SVP, Engineering and Operations
Bob Turner
SVP, Sales and Solution Architecture
Beth Keil
SVP, People and Culture
Roy Kim
VP, Product
Steve Klinger
VP, Ecosystem and Strategic Alliances
Kaushik Patel
VP, Photonics and Silicon Engineering
Sujatha Wagle
VP, Supply Chain Operations
Boon Tan
VP, Product Engineering
Kurt von Hausen
VP, Cloud Service Provider Sales
Colin Sturt
General Counsel
Israel Kandarian
Head of Creative Marketing
The company emphasizes first-principles thinking, technical depth, care for people, winning, delivering the future, and operating as one team without silos. Careers materials describe a multidisciplinary team spanning photonics, analog/digital design, systems, platforms, and machine learning.
Work style
Hybrid
Visa sponsorship
Limited
Compensation
Public job postings show competitive compensation, equity grants for applicable full-time roles, retirement matching, and a flexible/hybrid workplace. A Principal Field Application Engineer posting listed a $250,000–$300,000 USD on-target earnings range. Public labor-data summaries report H-1B LCAs, but sponsorship is role- and location-dependent.
Benefits
Pricing
Not publicly disclosed; appears to be enterprise hardware/design-in pricing, with evaluation kits and partner-specific configurations rather than public list pricing.
Differentiators
Technology
Customers
Competitors
Estimated revenue
Approximately $1M–$10M annually; third-party company-profile data reports about $9M, but this is an estimate and not company-reported.
Series D financing valued Lightmatter at $4.4 billion; Reuters reported that the CEO viewed it as potentially the company's last private funding round and discussed a future IPO. This is a strategic milestone, not evidence of distress.
SourcePassage M1000 and L200 were announced as production-oriented products, but availability, customer adoption, and commercialization remain execution risks typical of advanced semiconductor hardware.
SourceLightmatter · Jun 2026
Lightmatter announced participation in NVIDIA's NVLink Fusion ecosystem, targeting CPO/NPO interoperability for semi-custom AI infrastructure.
Lightmatter · Mar 2026
Lightmatter announced a 1.6 Tbps-per-fiber Passage demonstration with Qualcomm Technologies' 112G PAM4 optical SerDes chiplet.
Lightmatter · Mar 2025
The company announced the 114 Tbps Passage M1000 3D photonic interposer reference platform and the L200 product family.
Business Wire · Oct 2024
The Series D was led by T. Rowe Price and brought reported cumulative capital raised to $850M.
TechCrunch · Oct 2024
TechCrunch described the optical interconnect layer's role in linking large GPU clusters and reported the $4.4B Series D valuation.
63 jobs at Lightmatter