Neurophos is significantly expanding its executive and engineering teams and opening a new Silicon Valley office in Sunnyvale, California, as the semiconductor company works toward commercializing its photonic AI inference chips.
The expansion follows the company’s $110 million Series A announced in January 2026. Neurophos said it has quadrupled its workforce during 2026 and expects to double headcount again by year-end.
Neurophos develops metasurface-based photonic AI accelerator chips designed to provide high-performance and energy-efficient computing for AI inference.
The company’s leadership expansion includes the appointment of Dr. Nathan Kundtz as Chief Technology Officer, the promotion of Dr. Michael Shebanow to Senior Vice President of Engineering, the hiring of Kevin Keller as General Counsel, and an expanded role for Preston Woo as CFO and Chief Commercialization Officer.
Neurophos also appointed Nigel Toon, former CEO and Co-Founder of Graphcore, to its board of directors. Toon led Graphcore through its growth into a unicorn and its acquisition by SoftBank in 2024. Earlier in his career, he co-founded Icera, which was later acquired by NVIDIA.
Kundtz previously founded metamaterials-based satellite communications company Kymeta, where he served as Founder, CTO and CEO, and most recently served as CEO of synthetic data company Redered.ai.
Shebanow brings semiconductor experience spanning GPU architecture at NVIDIA, mobile graphics at Samsung and microprocessor engineering at AMD, HAL, Motorola and Cyrix. He has also held executive roles at Silicon Bee, Sapeon, HAL, Samsung and Cadence.
Neurophos has also added intellectual property and engineering talent. Justin Flanagan has joined as Director of Intellectual Property, Dr. Kristina Uhlendorf as Technical Fellow for Optics, Dr. Josh Isaacs as Director of Optics and Dr. Chris Pan as Director of Board Design.
Those hires bring experience from organizations including Magic Leap, Carl Zeiss, Jenoptik, Eikon Therapeutics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Intel, HP, Qualcomm, Huawei and Juniper.
Alongside the leadership expansion, Neurophos has established a new office in Sunnyvale and moved into a larger headquarters in Austin while maintaining its existing laboratory and prototyping facilities.
The company also plans to open a Low-Rate Initial Production Facility in Austin later in 2026, providing additional capacity as it moves toward commercialization and scale production. Neurophos is actively hiring engineers in both Austin and Silicon Valley.
KEY QUOTE:
“The addition of these industry-leading experts and the opening of our Silicon Valley office are crucial steps in accelerating Neurophos’ commercialization efforts. By scaling our team and expanding our geographic footprint, we are positioning ourselves to lead the next generation of high-performance computing and deliver on our mission to bring very large orders of metasurface-based photonic AI chips to market.”
Dr. Patrick Bowen, CEO and Co-Founder of Neurophos
