Lightelligence

Lightelligence (曦智科技) is a photonic computing chip company founded in 2017 by MIT physics PhD Yichen Shen (沈亦晨), who remains its founder-CEO, with offices in Boston and Shanghai . Its approach is the optical-electronic hybrid route — using light to accelerate the matrix multiplications that dominate AI workloads, while electronic chips handle the rest . Four years after founding it unveiled the PACE prototype, a chip with roughly 12,000 photonic devices that outpaced an Nvidia RTX 3080 on a specific Ising-model demonstration, and it has since pushed into optical interconnect and optical communication . By the time it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in April 2026, it held 410 patents, had 44 commercial customers, and claimed the world's top shipment volume among photonic computing chips — as FreeS Fund put it, "a road few have walked" from a PhD thesis to public company . On the investor side, FreeS backed it from the 2017 A round through a 2020 A+ round, ZhenFund was a seed investor, and 陈哲 (before starting his own fund) counted it among his AI deals at 5Y Capital .