When the Old Limits No Longer Work
The semiconductor industry has driven technological progress for over half a century. Moore’s Law and the relentless miniaturization of transistors have powered everything from your phone to the global cloud infrastructure. But that momentum is slowing. Physical limitations, energy efficiency challenges, and bandwidth bottlenecks are now forcing us to rethink the entire stack.
Simply put: electrons can only take us so far. The future runs on light.
Photonics isn’t a new idea. It’s been around for decades. However, integrated photonics has been restricted to the lab or niche applications. What’s changed is the need. Data centers are exploding with demand. AI models are getting larger. Edge computing and quantum systems are pushing traditional electronics to their limits.
Suddenly, integrated photonics isn’t a research curiosity. It’s an enabler. And it’s ready for the mainstream.
A Platform for the Next Wave
What PhotonPath is building is both precise and powerful: a fully programmable high speed optical networking platform. At the heart of their solution is the nanoOCM, an ultra-compact Optical Channel Monitor built using their proprietary integrated photonics chipset, PhotonCore™.
In high-capacity optical networks, especially those using DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing), it’s essential to continuously monitor the performance of each optical channel — checking power levels, signal quality, and wavelength accuracy. Traditional optical monitoring solutions tend to be bulky, power-hungry, and difficult to scale or integrate into modern infrastructures.
PhotonPath’s nanoOCM changes that. It offers real-time, high-speed, and space-efficient optical monitoring, delivering spectrum insights at the speed of light, which are around 50 times smaller than the current market alternatives. Even more impressive, their recent collaboration with Jabil led to a pluggable version in QSFP form factor, making it incredibly easy to deploy in existing networks without re-engineering hardware.
PhotonCore is enabled by not only the high performing photonic chips, but also by the advanced control electronics, algorithms, and automated photonic design and testing tools developed along the years inside PhotonPath.
PhotonPath is building the right tech, at the right time, with the right ambition.
The Team Driving It Forward
We often say we invest in teams more than ideas, and PhotonPath’s team is exactly why.
Douglas Aguiar, the CEO, struck us immediately as a founder with deep vision and grounded execution. He understands the long game but also knows how to win the next step. His leadership is balanced by Emanuele Guglielmi, the CTO, who brings a rare depth of scientific insight and technical precision. And with Federica Biancon as COO, the company has a strategic operator who knows how to build and scale industrial relationships.
This is one of the most balanced and driven founding teams we’ve met in deep tech. They’re not just engineers, they’re company builders.
Investing in the World We Want to See
At Join, we believe the next 10 years will be defined by a few key technological transitions, photonics being one of them. We’ll see compute architecture shift. Energy will become more precious. Speed and latency will matter more than ever. And intelligent systems will need to move vast amounts of data, securely and instantly.
PhotonPath sits at the heart of this transformation. Their platform isn’t just relevant today. It’s future-proof.
It’s the kind of company that helps write the infrastructure layer of tomorrow’s economy. And those are the companies we want to back.
We’re thrilled to support PhotonPath as they grow their team, refine their platform, and bring the power of light to the core of modern computing. The photonics revolution is just beginning, and this team is poised to lead it.
To Douglas, Emanuele, Federica, and the entire PhotonPath team: welcome to the Join Capital family. We’re proud to be on this journey with you.
