(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Inc. Executive Vice President Simona Jankowski will become LightMatter Inc.’s chief financial officer, joining the semiconductor startup that is aiming to play a part in the artificial intelligence computing boom.
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Jankowski takes on the role after spending nearly seven years at Nvidia in investor relations and strategic finance, and was previously a longtime semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He announced his departure from Nvidia last month.
Jankowski said he had no plans to leave Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable companies, until LightMatter came along. The Mountain View, California-based startup is hoping to revolutionize computing by allowing chips to communicate with light, making them faster and more efficient.
“This is my only chance to leave NVIDIA,” she said in an interview.
LightMatter aims to expand applications of a technology called silicon photonics, which replaces traditional copper connections with optical links. The approach has shown promise for some time but has not yet gone mainstream because of the difficulty of manufacturing the components at scale.
Co-founder and CEO Nick Harris said LightMatter has “incredible market traction” and its products will soon be deployed in some of the world’s largest data centers. The company is partnering with other chipmakers to provide components that work with their products. He declined to identify users of its technology.
LightMatter is well-funded, having raised about $500 million from investors including GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, Mr. Harris said in an interview. The company is close to raising enough capital to become self-sustaining, but will continue to prioritize growth with its available capital, Mr. Harris said.
He argued that the company, founded in 2017, is on track to be much bigger than Mellanox Technologies, the computer networking company that Nvidia acquired for roughly $7 billion in 2020. LightMatter raised $155 million last year at a valuation of $1.2 billion.
Harris said the company hired Jankowski because of her combination of technical knowledge and financial and planning skills.
Like Jankowski’s most recent employer, Lightmatter sees the use of artificial intelligence software as driving sweeping changes in the computing industry. Given the sheer size of new processors needed to develop AI software, and the amount of data and energy it requires, greater efficiency is essential.
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