PICs, funding, events, new hires, and more 

2025: What a banner year so far! This Sunday, August 10, marks our 7th anniversary. 

The NLM team, plus a few family members, on a boat in the Puget Sound in August 2025.

More Funding – Closing our Series A round 

In January, we closed our Series A funding with Emerald Technology Ventures as the lead investor and adding Oregon Venture Fund (OVF), StoryHouse Ventures, and Idemitsu. Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK) Co., Ltd., Pack Ventures, and other existing investors completed the round. 

As part of their investment, Frank Balas represents Emerald Technology Ventures on the NLM Board, and we’ve brought in Dr. Andrew Grenville as an Independent Director and Board Chair. The other two Board members are NLM CEO Brad Booth and CTO Dr. Lewis Johnson. TOK, OVF, Idemitsu, Hamamatsu, and Pack VC are observer advisors to the Board. 

Leading the way with our 1.6 Terabit DR8 photonic integrated circuit (PIC) 

In April at OFC 50, we debuted our groundbreaking, first 8-channel PIC, alongside our partners Advanced Micro Foundry (AMF), Centera Photonics, and Enosemi. This demonstration represents a significant commercialization milestone for hybrid organic electro-optic (OEO) technology, featuring unprecedented performance and stability through our patented material, Selerion™-HTX. 

We shared this private demo with partners, friends, journalists, and industry peers. For a peek into it, Optica’s Jon Pugh did an extensive video interview with Brad on our demo. AMF also featured our demo during their keynote talk at their Silicon Photonics Summit. 

Technical team expansion! 

With recent hires to our technical team, we’ve grown the company by 60%! This expansion will greatly help us with new and existing projects, scaling our technical abilities, and allowing us to innovate more widely. Our newest full-time employees bring critical knowledge, expertise, and experience in semiconductor process development, nanofabrication, metrology, formulation development, and mechanical engineering, among other fields. 

We also expanded our offices to include a location in Seattle’s Roosevelt neighborhood. This office serves our Operations, Finance, Business Development, and Marketing departments and any non-lab work needs, allowing for easier growth and more privacy. Our R&D and engineering labs remain in Fluke Hall on the University of Washington campus and have expanded to accommodate additional team members and equipment. 

Catch up with us! 

On the scientific side, patent claims for our Selerion-BHX (BAHX) material have been approved in the US. This announcement came alongside the publication of our newest scientific paper, “Ultrahigh Performance Cross-linkable Organic Electro-Optic Material for Hybrid Modulators,” in Chemistry of Materials, coauthored with researchers from Polariton Technologies, University of Washington, ETH-Zürich, and KU Leuven. The paper confirms Selerion-BHX’s record-breaking EO performance and modulation efficiency in PICs. 

On the business side, NLM graduated from the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) Program’s 2024/2025 cycle in May. The CDL-Vancouver Compute Stream started with around 20 companies, and we, along with 8 other ventures, graduated from the program. This 9-month program offers founders the opportunity to learn from experienced entrepreneurs.  

Brad was interviewed on the following podcasts: Laser Focus World Podcast “Following the Photons” and Photonics.com Podcast “All Things Photonics.” He was also interviewed in SemiWiki and Electro Optics and quoted in Optica’s OFC 50 industry reflections and CIO’s data center AI tips. 

This fall, you’ll find us at European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Copenhagen and Optica Photonic-Enabled Cloud Computing Industry Summit (PECC Summit) in Sunnyvale, CA. Brad will speak at PECC, so make sure to bring him all your questions. If you can’t swing by those events, he’ll be doing an Electro Optics webinar, “Optical solutions for high-speed data transmission,” on Wednesday, September 24. 

Photonics continues to meet the moment 

As LLM/AI expansion continues to drive extraordinary demand on data center bandwidth and increased power consumption, photonics leads as a solution. NLM’s cutting-edge OEO modulation technology transforms data centers, AI, communications, and quantum computing. By enabling higher bandwidth and lower power consumption while requiring minimal process disruption, we’re helping solve critical challenges in efficiency and sustainability. 

Cheers to many more years!