Vivek has over 18 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.
Tell us about your company?
Xscape Photonics develops custom multi-color silicon photonics fabric solutions to solve escape bandwidth bottlenecks in AI hardware. The company has grown from a seed first planted decades ago at Columbia University, where several of our founders first proposed, and then helped practically develop, our multi-color laser platform from academic research into a market-ready product.
We have raised $95M in total investment that includes notable investors like Addition, IAG, Nvidia and Cisco. Our leadership team brings years of experience working for some of the largest and most influential technology companies today, including Broadcom, Intel, Cisco, Lumentum and NeoPhotonics.
What problems are you solving?
Xscape Photonics is solving the problem in data center networks of Escape Bandwidth: the maximum amount of optical data that can be moved off-chip and into the system at a time. This problem creates a bottleneck for agentic AI workloads and leads to inefficient data flow, wasted energy and idle GPUs (low GPU utilization). To solve this problem, we are replacing outdated legacy copper interconnects with multi-color silicon photonics that maximize data bandwidth and throughput on each individual fiber.
What application areas are your strongest?
Our products enable next-generation, optics-based AI interconnects for data center fabrics to connect different scales of GPUs, switches and memories: scale-up, scale-out and scale-across. Our laser platform can support multiple system architectures, including Co-Packaged Optics, Near-Package Optics and Pluggable Optics.
What keeps your customers up at night?
Our customers are constantly optimizing hardware for maximizing Tokens/s/MW and minimizing cost of token generation. However, the energy consumption, operating costs and low throughput of existing networks results in a 10-50X drop in Tokens/s/MW for large context and Agentic AI applications. This calls for rewiring networks with a new solution.
Additionally, customers are looking for solutions that are scalable and available as early as possible. Xscape’s platform addresses all the concerns: Power, cost, scale, and time to market.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
The optical interconnect landscape is expansive, with startups like Xscape Photonics, Lightmatter, Ayar Labs and Celestial AI developing new solutions alongside industry titans like NVIDIA, Broadcom and AMD. The depth and breadth of competition today is an indicator of how valuable this technology is to enabling real AI advancements and ROI.
What sets Xscape Photonics apart from anyone else in the field is our CombX technology, a programmable laser source that can scale our data center fabric platform, ChromX, to hundreds of different wavelengths or colors. Whereas our competitors largely rely on external or hybrid laser sources, Xscape Photonics is developing the first multi-color laser source on chip that can truly scale bandwidth performance by 40X, compared to other state of the art solutions, and deliver 10X value at application level for the end customer.
What new features/technology are you working on?
We are building ChromX, the industry’s first programmable multi-wavelength (up to 128 colors and beyond) photonics platform for custom AI data center fabrics. Two products supporting that platform are available today: EagleX and FalconX.
EagleX is a plug-and-play technology evaluation kit for the ChromX platform. It offers a high channel count, 200-GHz spacing, high power channel and up to 16 colors in a PM-fiber output.
FalconX is the industry’s first fully redundant ELSFP module capable of emitting up to eight wavelengths of light for ultra-fast, high-capacity and low-power optical data transmission. FalconX can generate up to 8 O-band wavelengths, with greater than 1W total optical power in an output fiber, from a single off-the-shelf DFB pump laser.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Xscape Photonics is headquartered in Silicon Valley, so we are fortunate to count many of our customers as our neighbors. We partner with Accelerator and networking providers and deliver final solutions to Hyperscaler. We are also keen to take advantage of our presence at the most significant industry events; most recently, at OFC 2026 in Los Angeles.
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