Hitesh Sahoo
Six Questions for Hitesh Sahoo – Co-founder and CEO of Phanofi of Denmark
Hitesh Kumar Sahoo is originally from the historic eastern India city of Bhubaneswar. He was keen on electronics since childhood and pursued deep technical studies towards instrumentation, MEMS and photonic materials from a B.E. with Honors from Birla Institute in India through a Masters at U-Pennsylvania to a PhD from the Technical University of Denmark where he found an interesting line of inquiry in laser technology and met his eventual business partner Dagmawi Alemayehu Bekele, the inventor of the IP that has become Phanofi.
1. What problem is Phanofi is solving and how?
The advancement of AI and high-performance chipset is exponentially growing the petabytes of data flowing through datacenters and HPCs, yet the connectivity between chips and between blades or nodes has not kept pace. Deployment of fiber optics as inter-and intra-server connections has been one advance, but now even that is being exhausted. Phanofi’s technology is able to support 4 times the dataflow for a given laser beam, which also means around 30% less energy consumption for a given dataflow, increasingly valuable as HPC energy demands are expanding.
2. What is your background that led you to founding Phanofi?
From an early age, I have always been intrigued by what we can do with science and technology, you know, it’s like magic. I always enjoyed science experiments as a kid and been fascinated about what we can do outside earth, where does life exist and all those things. This led me to a bachelors and master’s in science and engineering, eventually narrowing down my interest to semiconductors. My jump into photonics was an unintentional happy accident. For my PhD I was looking for a real world application-oriented project in semiconductor space and I came across Technical University of Denmark (DTU) where they were developing lasers for eye imaging. So, I had a chance to work on something interesting and get an opportunity to learn something new. So, I jumped in. I also believe science is important to our society and that taking research out of the lab to the real world is a big task best done by the person who actually understands why the research was made. So, in a sense, research is incomplete until you actually move it all the way to application and that’s precisely what I see the role of a CEO founder to be. I often say I’m a research based entrepreneur where I’m focused on bringing the research component into the real world for society. And I have been enjoying this part quite significantly. So yeah, I’m happy to be doing what I’m doing.
3. What is unique about your technology and what is its validation status?
Right now, most fiber optic data transmission is based on the amplitude of the light source or laser. But there are two other dimensions of light – phase and polarization. Multiplexing data across all three dimensions has been well established, but it turns out the ‘demux’, or decoding back from the three dimensions of light into electronics has been a significant challenge, requiring a lot of energy and use of alot of expensive digital signal processors (DSPs). Phanofi’s unique breakthrough is a process to decode amplitude, phase and polarization in a very simple, and hence resource efficient and low-cost way. We have thoroughly demonstrated our core technique in lab settings and are currently building our minimum viable product (MVP) with an industry partner to demonstrate the complete system.
4. What are your Go-To-Market ideas and traction received so far?
We are looking at the transceiver element in the data infrastructure. With fiber, the transceiver has a photonics part and an electronics part. We see ourselves as a fabless design unit where we actually manufacture the chip in collaboration with foundries and our customers are going to be OEMs or system integrators – we provide the photonics part and they provide with the electronics part, which are then packaged into transceivers or pluggables to sell to the end user. In particular, the photonics industry is quite conservative and requires alot of end-to-end demonstration to gain real traction. So, we’ve been working together with our industry partner who manufactures DSPs to define all the output standards. We already have taped it out so once the chips are back we will put them together and then go for the demonstration. Also, the whole data center architecture is going through a major transformation so we are also collaborating with end-users to understand what forms they would want and on what level we should come in and integrate with the end user. But at the same time we are very aware of being compatible with the whole ecosystem. So we are building this very modular unit which can talk to other existing technology and protocols in the industry.
5. What is next?
2025 is going to be an important year for us. We have our MVP demonstration planned in the fall with our industry partner. We also expect to create further partnerships and joint development projects that will accelerate our access to expert knowledge and advanced infrastructure. We’re growing our team and moving into larger offices, adding key competencies, expanding the advisory board with industry experts. By the end of 2025 we expect to be raising a round of venture capital funding. Our focus is on datacenters, but our core technology will have multiple applications in chip-to-chip communication as well as new areas like quantum communication with high density and also satellite communication which has a small power and heat budget for lasers. Being fabless helps because we are agile and can move fast to address multiple markets.
6. Tell us about your experience with XTC
I really appreciated the transparent, clear communication throughout the competition. There was a great training video on how you should prepare a short-pitch slide deck. I found it quite helpful because it gave me insight on what I should prioritize. Once I saw the video, the first thing I did was rewrite my slide deck. Even if I didn’t win, I would really have been happy just I went through the process because it helped me find this resource and simplify my slide deck. I was also impressed with the caliber of judges from around the world who evaluated our pitch. Having Phanofi get exposure at such a high level of investor was very important for us.
