Nick Harris is Founder and CEO of Lightmatter, pioneering photonic computing to power AI infrastructure with light instead of electricity. He holds a PhD from MIT with 87+ patents, over 10,000 citations, and is an Optica Fellow and MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35.

Harris earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a BS in EECS from University of Idaho. He worked as an R&D engineer at Micron Technology focusing on DRAM and NAND circuits before his doctoral research in quantum photonics.

Harris was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow and NSF Fellow at MIT, where his doctoral thesis explored programmable nanophotonics for quantum computing and AI. He co-founded Lightmatter in 2017 with Darius Bunandar and Thomas Graham, winning the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Lightmatter raised $850M total funding and reached a $4.4B valuation in October 2024, with investors including T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, and GV. The company partners with AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and Qualcomm to deploy its Passage photonic interconnect and Envise AI accelerator chips.

Lightmatter's Passage platform enables 100x bandwidth improvements for chip-to-chip communication, connecting thousands to millions of GPUs at light speed. The company is transforming AI data center infrastructure by dramatically reducing power consumption and enabling unprecedented computational scale for next-generation AI models.