Nvidia’s Jankowski Takes CFO Job at Chip Startup Lightmatter

(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp. Vice President Simona Jankowski is becoming chief financial officer at Lightmatter Inc., joining a chip startup that’s angling to become part of the artificial intelligence computing boom.

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Jankowski is taking the role after a nearly seven-year stint at Nvidia, where she oversaw investor relations and strategic finance. Prior to that, she was a longtime chip analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The executive announced last month that she was leaving Nvidia.

Jankowski said that she hadn’t been looking to depart Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable companies, until Lightmatter came along. The Mountain View, California-based startup is attempting to shake up the computing world by letting chips communicate with light, potentially making them faster and more efficient.

“It’s just about the only opportunity that I would have left Nvidia for,” she said in an interview.

Lightmatter is trying to broaden the use of a technology called silicon photonics, which replaces traditional copper wire connections with optical linkages. The approach has long been seen as promising, but it hasn’t gone mainstream yet because of the difficulty of manufacturing the components at scale.

According to co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Nick Harris, Lightmatter has “incredible market traction” and its products will soon make an appearance in some of the world’s largest data centers. The company works with other chipmakers, offering parts that link their products. He declined to identify the users of its technology.

Lightmatter is well-funded, having raised roughly half a billion dollars from investors such as GV, the firm formerly known as Google Ventures, Harris said in an interview. It’s close to having enough money coming in to be self-sustaining but will take advantage of available capital to prioritize growth, he said.

The company, founded in 2017, is on course to be much bigger than Mellanox Technologies, a computer networking company that Nvidia bought in 2020 for roughly $7 billion, he argued. Lightmatter raised $155 million last year at a $1.2 billion valuation.

Harris said the company enlisted Jankowski because of her mixture of technical knowledge and financial and planning skills.

Like Jankowski’s most recent employer, Lightmatter believes that the use of artificial intelligence software is sparking a wholesale change in the computing industry. The massive size of new processors needed to develop AI software — along with the amount of data and energy required — mean greater efficiency is a necessity.