Nvidia’s former VP of investor relations and strategic finance, Simona Jankowski, has been appointed CFO of photonic computing company Lightmatter.
Jankowski left Nvidia last month after almost seven years with the company. Prior to her stint with the GPU giant, she was a managing director at Goldman Sachs for over a decade and a half.
“I am thrilled to join this brilliant team of inventors, technologists, and accomplished industry executives to help scale the company for significant growth in the years ahead,” said Jankowski in a statement.
Nick Harris, co-founder and CEO of Lightmatter added that her appointment would allow the company to scale its operations and culture and prepare for the next phase of growth.
"We are proud to bring on an accomplished leader at the helm of our finance organization as we build the technology powering the next generation of AI innovation,” he said.
Founded in 2017, Boston-based Lightmatter specializes in photonics-enabled technologies, using light instead of electrical signals for computing. This means that its chips don’t experience the same heat or resistance as traditional chip architectures.
The company currently offers two chips: Envise and Passage. Envise has been specifically developed to support AI workloads, while Passage is an interconnect that takes arrays of traditional processors and links them up using a programmable on-chip optical network.
In December 2023, Lightmatter reached unicorn status, achieving a $1.2 billion valuation off the back of a $155 million extended Series C funding round.
