Juniyali Nauriyal is the CEO and Co-Founder of Photonect, a photonics startup focused on commercializing advanced fiber-to-chip attachment technologies. Juniyali is the co-inventor of Photonect’s core technology, which forms the foundation of the company. As CEO, she leads Photonect in translating cutting-edge photonic packaging research into scalable, real-world solutions.
She has participated in prestigious accelerator programs including Activate, the Luminate Accelerator. Under her leadership, Photonect won the Grand Prize at the New York State Business Plan Competition (2022). Juniyali has received multiple competitive awards and scholarships, including the Corning Women in Optical Communications Scholarship (2022) from Optica, the SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship (2022), the Harvey M. Pollicove Memorial Scholarship (2018) from Optica, and the Best ISA Student Award (2016) from ISA–Maharashtra. She currently serves as Vice Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) Rochester and was named Emerging Technology Woman of the Year (2025). Juniyali holds 7 patents and has authored 20 technical publications, including 2 first-author papers.
Tell us about your company?
Photonect is a Rochester-based startup addressing a critical bottleneck in photonic packaging: slow, costly, and unreliable fiber-to-chip attachment driven by epoxy. Attaching an optical fiber is as delicate as aligning two strands of hair, yet current approaches rely on glue. Photonect’s technology includes a patented chip architecture design called the oxide mode converter and laser fusion process that forms permanent glass-to-glass bonds in under a minute. This improves coupling efficiency from ~50% to ~80%, maintains <1 dB loss, increases throughput by 10×, and reduces per-device cost by 50%. This technology is being advanced into PIX-Attach, a Rochester-designed laser splicing system built for high-volume photonic integration set to launch at OFC 2026.
Please share a little bit more about how company was founded?
Photonect was founded by Dr. Juniyali Nauriyal as a spin-off from the University of Rochester, rooted directly in her doctoral research in integrated photonics. Originally an engineering student in India, Juniyali came to the U.S. to pursue an MS in Optics at the University of Rochester, where she joined the lab of Dr. Jaime Cárdenas. That collaboration evolved into her PhD work and eventually started Photonect itself.
During her PhD, Juniyali co-invented Photonect’s core technology along with Dr. Cárdenas, who is now the company’s CTO and Co-Founder. Rather than taking a traditional path into a large tech firm, Juniyali chose to commercialize her research to ensure it could deliver real-world impact. Her work led to a breakthrough approach to fiber-to-chip light coupling, improving efficiency while addressing the growing sustainability challenges driven by AI and data-center expansion.
Inspired by issues such as the rising energy demands of data centers and even their migration to colder regions to manage heat, Juniyali founded Photonect with a clear mission: to build high-performance photonic technologies that scale responsibly and support a more energy-efficient future.
What problems are you solving?
We address the limitations of epoxy-based fiber-to-chip attachment, which is slow, costly, and inherently unreliable. Today, epoxy is commonly used to connect/attach optical fibers to chips even though these joints are critical to data transfer efficiency, often resulting in up to 50% signal loss, increased heat generation, and long, labor-intensive assembly times that severely limit scalability. Our laser-assisted attachment technology replaces epoxy with a glass-to-glass bond, like soldering. This enables fiber-to-chip attachment in seconds instead of minutes, while delivering long-term reliability and stability across wide temperature ranges. In parallel, our proprietary mode converter technology significantly improves coupling efficiency, achieving <1 dB loss per chip facet and reducing overall link budget requirements by ~25%.
What Industries is your solution a good fit for ?
Our solution is a strong fit for industries undergoing a shift toward dense, high-performance optical integration, driven by the speed, power, and reliability demands of modern computing. This includes AI data centers and cloud infrastructure, high-performance computing, telecommunications, and emerging markets like quantum technologies. As copper and conventional photonic interconnects hit physical limits, Photonect’s technology delivers a step-change in performance, scalability, and energy efficiency, enabling these industries to keep pace with rapidly growing system demands.
What keeps your customers up at night?
Our customers worry about scaling photonic products to high volume without blowing up cost, power use, or yield. Today’s fiber-to-chip attachment is slow, energy-intensive, and requires specialized manpower, often forcing teams to choose between scalability and efficiency putting timelines, margins, and reliability at risk specially now as AI and data-center demand accelerates.
Q6.What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
In fiber-to-chip attachment landscape, existing solutions include wire bonding, fiber packaging with epoxy, and passive alignment approaches some players offer high-precision automated assembly systems that still rely on active alignment and adhesive bonding, none of which have been able to fully replace epoxy. Photonect takes a fundamentally different approach by adhesives through its proprietary laser-assisted attachment process. Our technology enables fiber-to-chip attachment in few seconds, achieves <1 dB optical loss, and delivers throughput of up to 60 attachments per hour.
In addition, our proprietary mode converter designs further reduce coupling losses by 15–20%, while maintaining high power compatibility and reliability across extreme temperature ranges.
What new features/technology are you working on?
We’re working on PIX-Attach, a next-generation laser-assisted, epoxy-free fiber-to-chip attachment platform that dramatically speeds up photonic packaging, cutting attach time to ~60 seconds per unit, enabling ~60 units per hour, improving alignment stability, reducing energy use, and significantly increasing production throughput while lowering the number of machines needed on the factory floor. Our value proposition lies in creating a premium and customized fiber attach equipment that fit’s the customers need. We are all set to launch this in mid-March 2026.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
We’re present at all major conferences such as OFC, Photonics West, and ECOC. You can also reach out to us directly at info@photonectcorp.com, or submit a query or request a meeting through our website.
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