Ayar Labs Expands Executive Team to Lead the Next Phase of Growth in Optical I/O Production and Broad Commercial Adoption

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Ayar Labs, a leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, has expanded its executive team to further commercial development, with the addition of Lakshmikant (LK) Bhupathi, Vice President of Products, Strategy and Ecosystem, and Scott Clark, Vice President of Manufacturing and Operations. In these newly created roles, Bhupathi and Clark will focus on product management, manufacturing, supply chain, ecosystem and partner development to build scale for Ayar Labs’ optical I/O solution with new and existing partners and customers such as NVIDIA, Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lockheed Martin, GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers, and others.

“As Ayar Labs moves aggressively into the production of our core optical I/O technology, we’re turning our attention to scaling commercial efforts and expanding our product line both horizontally and vertically,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “LK and Scott play a critical role in helping position us for the next exciting phase of growth as we lead not just the technical development but also the production of optical I/O.”

Bhupathi joins Ayar Labs following twenty years with Marvell Semiconductor (NASDAQ: MRVL) in a variety of design, technical marketing and product roles, including a position as Vice President, Product Management / Marketing at high performance networking company Aquantia (acquired by Marvell), as well as driving CXL and Ethernet NIC product strategy and roadmap for Marvell’s next-generation cloud and enterprise datacenter applications. Bhupathi also served as the President and Marketing Chair for the NBASE-T alliance (since merged with the Ethernet Alliance).

Clark comes to Ayar Labs with extensive manufacturing, supply chain and operations senior leadership experience, most recently as Vice President of Supply Chain at Corsair Gaming (NASDAQ: CRSR). Clark has spent the past two decades leading global supply chain management, procurement, operations and manufacturing transformations for public and private companies, including work in the optical market and an extended period living and working in Asia, through positions at Allied Telesis in Japan, Stratalight Communications, which was acquired by OpNext, Arecont Vision, AOptix Technologies and Tascent, a spinoff of AOptix.

In addition to the new executive leadership team hires, Ayar Labs has also expanded its office footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area and opened a new office in Cambridge, Mass. The new office in San Jose, Calif., located at 695 River Oaks Parkway, has eight times as much clean room space as the existing Santa Clara office and will facilitate the company’s test, measurement, validation and qualification efforts (completion of this move is planned for early 2023). The East Coast office, located at 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Ste. 401, Cambridge, Mass., is a return to the company’s roots near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Ayar Labs’ co-founders met and started the company back in 2015.

To learn more about Ayar Labs’ chip-to-chip optical technology and mission, please visit: https://ayarlabs.com

About Ayar Labs

Ayar Labs is disrupting the traditional performance, cost, and efficiency curves of the semiconductor and computing industries by driving a 1000x improvement in interconnect bandwidth density at 10x lower power. Ayar Labs’ patented approach uses industry standard cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high density, low power optical based interconnect “chiplets” and lasers to replace traditional electrical based I/O. The company was founded in 2015 and is funded by a number of domestic and international venture capital firms as well as strategic investors. For more information, visit https://ayarlabs.com.