EP #463 - Frédéric Loizeau: How Photonic Integrated Circuits Will Supercharge AI

Timestamps:

4:35 - Similarities between entrepreneurship and academia

9:02 - What are photonic integrated circuits?

16:07 - Approaching customers from different industries

17:09 - Why Lightium is still in beta stage

18:51 - What business model do they plan on adopting?

This episode was produced in collaboration with startup days, taking place next year on May 14th 2025. Click ⁠here⁠ to purchase your ticket.

About Frédéric Loizeau:

Frédéric Loizeau is the co-founder and CRO of Lightium, a Swiss startup enabling the next generation of photonic integrated circuits. He holds a PhD in Microsystems from EPFL and worked as a researcher at Stanford and as a key account manager at Sensirion and Business & Technology Development Manager at CSEM before starting Lightium in 2023.

Lightium provides production-grade TFLN PIC foundry services to customers in the datacom, telecom, AI, Quantum, and aerospace industries. What does this mean? It means they manufacture photonic integrated circuits, which are essential to making the transfer of information faster. This is relevant for fiber optic internet, in the telecom industry, but also quite relevant for space satellites. Lastly, it’s crucial for AI: the recent developments in this field have increased our need not only for computing power (which NVIDIA solved by providing their GPUs to data centers), but also for greater bandwidth — that’s where Lightium’s tech comes in.

They frame their technology as a service, through which people from different industries can design their own photonic integrated circuits that will then be manufactured by the Lightium team. Lightium has had great success since the very beginning: when they were still working on their idea at the CSEM research center and tentatively reaching out to customers asking for letters of recommendation, they got cheques instead. Nowadays their success continues: they recently raised a CHF 7M seed round.

The cover portrait was edited by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.smartportrait.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.‍

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