News: Optoelectronics
10 November 2022
Ayar Labs adds VP of products, strategy & ecosystem and VP of manufacturing & operations
To further its commercial development, chip-to-chip optical connectivity firm Ayar Labs of Santa Clara, CA, USA has expanded its executive team by adding Lakshmikant (LK) Bhupathi as VP of products, strategy & ecosystem and Scott Clark as VP of manufacturing & 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,” says CEO Charles Wuischpard. “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 after 20 years with Marvell Semiconductor in design, technical marketing and product roles, including a position as VP, 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 data-center applications. Bhupathi also served as the president and marketing chair for the NBASE-T alliance (since merged with the Ethernet Alliance).
Clark has extensive manufacturing, supply chain and operations senior leadership experience, most recently as VP of supply chain at Corsair Gaming. He 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).
Ayar Labs has also expanded its office footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area and opened a new office in Cambridge, MA, USA. The new office in San Jose, CA (at 695 River Oaks Parkway) has eight times as much cleanroom 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 (at 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Ste. 401, Cambridge, MA) 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 in 2015.
Ayar Labs raises $130m in Series C funding round
