Lightmatter Appoints Vice President of Sales and Head of Product; Announces West Coast HQ

Experienced sales and product leaders join Lightmatter to drive next phase of growth

Lightmatter, the leader in photonic computing, announced it has named Bob Turner its new Vice President of Sales and Sudarshan Yadav its new Head of Product. This announcement comes on the heels of Lightmatter’s $80M Series B investment round, led by Viking Global Investors, to fuel accelerated volume production and go-to-market strategy for its first generation hardware products.  

Lightmatter also announced the opening of its first West Coast office in the Bay Area, proof of continued momentum as the company prepares to bring its industry-leading AI accelerator chip to market. Lightmatter’s team has doubled in size over the last 18 months to 75 employees, and the company will continue to invest in attracting top talent to join its team. 

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“Bob and Sudarshan are seasoned sales and product management leaders respectively, each with proven track records of success, and I’m thrilled to welcome them to Lightmatter,“ said Nick Harris, Lightmatter CEO and co-founder. “We’re focused on building chips to enable the next wave of AI innovation and Bob and Sudarshan will play critical leadership roles as we continue to grow our team and deliver our compute solutions to the global technology market.” 

Bob Turner joins Lightmatter with more than 15 years of experience delivering sales strategies that drive exponential business growth. Most recently, Bob served as the Director of Sales, Central and Eastern United States at Graphcore. In his new role, Bob will lead Lightmatter’s sales and technical support teams to sell, provide exceptional customer support and maximize long-term revenue growth of Lightmatter hardware and software photonic compute solutions.

“Lightmatter’s new paradigm in photonic semiconductor chip technology sets a new performance bar that surpasses what’s possible using traditional, all-transistor architectures,” said Bob Turner, Vice President of Sales, Lightmatter. “I’m honored to be joining the company leading the charge in delivering a new generation of the highest-performance, highest efficiency AI compute solutions to market.” 

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As Head of Product, Sudarshan Yadav will build and lead Lightmatter’s product management team to deliver on Lightmatter’s photonic compute products, beginning with ensuring success of its AI accelerator early access program. Sudarshan brings a wealth of product management experience to Lightmatter, with prior product leadership roles at Uber and Microsoft. 

“I simply had to be part of Lightmatter’s journey,” said Sudarshan Yadav, Head of Product, Lightmatter. During my time building and operating several generations of hyper-scale cloud services, the unique importance of what Lightmatter was doing was crystal clear to me. It is clear that our technology has the potential to shape the future of not just artificial intelligence, but computing in general.”  

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