About Hyperlight
HyperLight makes optical modulators from thin-film lithium niobate, a crystal whose refractive index shifts quickly under an electric field. A modulator is the part that encodes data onto a light beam in fibre links and data centre networks. The material allows high speed at low drive voltage compared with silicon or indium phosphide designs. The company sells packaged modulators and a chiplet platform, and it announced a 110 GHz IQ modulator aimed at signalling above 240 GBaud. HyperLight is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was spun out of Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard.
Hyperlight was founded in 2018 and is based in Cambridge, MA, United States. It is listed under Photonic Computing, Interconnect & Networking. Reported funding is $37M Series B (2025, led by Summit Partners).
Compute Technologies
- Photonics
What Hyperlight works on
Photonic Computing
Photonic computing uses light instead of electricity to carry or process information. Photons have no charge, so light in a waveguide does not cause the resistive heating that current in a wire does, though lasers and modulators still use power, and many wavelengths can share one waveguide. The industry has two quite different parts: moving data with light, and computing with light.
Interconnect & Networking
Interconnect is the set of links that move data between chips, between boards and between racks. It includes wires on a package, cables inside a server, and the network switches and optical fibre across a data center. A processor is only as useful as the speed at which it can get data in and out.
Also in United States
Celestial AI, Lightwave Logic, Lumentum, GlobalFoundries, Applied Optoelectronics
