Lightelligence

Company Overview

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Shanghai, Lightelligence is a company focused on thehybridization of optoelectronicsThe company is a high-tech enterprise in the field of arithmetic. With the vision of “Harnessing Light to Breakthrough Arithmetic Boundary”, the company is committed to solving the problem of arithmetic shortage in the era of artificial intelligence by integrating the advantages of photonics and electronics. The company's core technology is based on a paper published by its founder, Dr. Yichen Shen, in Nature Photonics, which for the first time verified the feasibility of using light to perform computing, laying the foundation for hybrid computing with optoelectronics. The company has built a product system centered on optical interconnect and optical computing, and is a leader in the global optoelectronic hybrid track.

Team Members

1. Founder and CEO Shen Yichen
   • D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the tutelage of the godfather of nano-optics, John Joannopoulos, and Genius Award winner Marin Soljacic.
   • Named to the 2017 Forbes Global 30 under 30, he has published more than 30 papers and holds 8 patents for his inventions.
   • Deep collaboration with the world's top researchers such as Yann Lecun (Director of Facebook AI Lab), the godfather of contemporary artificial intelligence.
2. Co-founder and CTO Meng Huaiyu
   • D. in electrical engineering from MIT, with research interests in integrated photonics for applications in artificial intelligence, electronic communications, and other fields.
   • He has published more than 10 papers in top journals, applied for more than 200 patents worldwide, and has been granted more than 40 patents.
   • Leading the research and development of the world's first on-chip optical interconnection technology, awarded the “World Artificial Intelligence Conference Yunfan Award - Bright Star” title.
3. Core Team
   • Members come from top institutions such as MIT and Columbia University, and cover fields such as physics, electrical engineering, and computer science.
   • This includes Boaz Efroni Rotman, VP of Marketing (23 years of global business development experience), Gilbert Hendry, VP of Software and Machine Learning (former Google and Microsoft engineer), and others.

Products & Services

1. Optical Interconnect Product Line
   • Photowave: The first computing optical interconnect hardware compatible with PCIe and CXL protocols, supporting multi-layer interconnections between chips (C2C), cards (B2B), and servers (S2S), enabling large-scale data center performance scaling.
   • LightSphere X: The world's first distributed optical path switching solution to build high-bandwidth, low-latency, flexible and scalable smart computing clusters, which won the SAIL Award, the highest award at the 2025 World Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
   • Co-Packaged Optics (CPO): Packaging optical transceivers with electrical chips to reduce power consumption and cost, with the first project on the ground.
2. Optical Computing Product Line
   • PACE Series::
     • PACE 2 (Xi Zhi Tian Hub): Integrates over 40,000 photonic devices, supports 128×128 matrix operations, and can run commercial AI models such as ResNet50 and LLaMA.
     • PACE 3 (planned): Supports 256×256 optical matrix and natively integrates inter-chip optical network technology to solve the problem of large language model inference delay.
   • OptiHummingbird: AI inference card that utilizes on-chip optical networking technology to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency data transfer for 64 compute cores.
   • Gazelle Evaluation Board: Contains a programmable optical matrix multiplier unit that supports QUBO-like problem solving (e.g., Ising's problem, max-cut problem) and Transformer modeling runs.
3. prescription
   • Provides full value chain integration from chip design to system deployment, supporting end-to-end deployment of optical interconnect kcal GPU clusters.
   • Launched more than 15 design-in collaborations with GPU and server manufacturers to drive the commercialization of optoelectronic hybrid computing power.

major client

1. Big Data and Cloud Computing: Work with mainstream data centers around the world to improve arithmetic density and energy efficiency.
2. Financial sector: Applied to high-frequency trading, risk modeling and other scenarios to accelerate complex computational tasks.
3. automatic driving: Supports real-time sensing and decision-making systems to reduce latency and improve safety.
4. Biomedical and Materials Research: Accelerated molecular dynamics simulation and gene sequencing analysis.
5. AI infrastructure operators: Jointly released the commercial version of Optical Leap Super Node 128 with Wall Ren Technology and ZTE, adapting to the mainstream domestic large models.

development prospect

1. technology-driven
   • Continuous investment in optical interconnect chip design (e.g., co-packaged optics) and optical computing product iterations (e.g., PACE 3) to break through the arithmetic bottleneck.
   • Build a new ecosystem of optoelectronic hybrid arithmetic and promote the technology from the lab to commercial scale.
2. market expansion
   • domestic market: Obtained orders from large Internet companies and AI infrastructure operators with Scale-up OCS and other fist products.
   • international market: Explore the North American market, focusing on scenarios such as memory scaling based on the CXL architecture.
3. Commercialization progress
   • China's Scale-up Optical Interconnect Market reached 5.7 billion RMB in 2025 and is expected to increase to 185.5 billion RMB in 2030, growing at a CAGR of 99.61 TP4T. Xi Zhi Technology occupies 88.31 TP4T market share, ranking first among independent suppliers.
   • The world's No. 1 in cumulative shipments of optical computing products, and ahead of competitors in the commercial application stage.
4. Capital and Ecology
   • Completed the C round financing of 1.5 billion yuan, post-investment valuation of 7.8 billion yuan, shareholders include Tencent, China Mobile, Sequoia Capital and so on.
   • Attract developers through the open-source platform to build an ecosystem of algorithms and applications, and lower the industry's R&D threshold.
5. future outlook
   • If successfully landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it will become the world's “AI silicon optical chip first stock”, leading the transformation of computing power infrastructure from “electricity” to “light”.
   • The goal is to achieve large-scale deployment of photovoltaic hybrid arithmetic by 2030 and to drive the popularization of smart arithmetic networks.