A Cambridge company that makes design software and ready-made building blocks to help engineers create photonic chips faster.
Wave Photonics helps engineers design chips that carry light instead of electricity, known as photonic integrated circuits. Designing these chips is slow because the manufacturing process varies and every factory has its own rules. Wave builds design technology that takes that variation into account, and sells designs and tools that are matched to particular factories. Its founders say the platform can generate a design library in about three weeks, against the six to twelve months that is normal in the industry. Its work covers quantum technologies, sensing, data centres, telecoms and healthcare.
The company was founded in Cambridge in May 2021 by James Lee and Matthew Anderson, both of whom have PhDs in quantum photonics from Cambridge, with Mateusz Kubica as chief technology officer. Its stated mission is to replace the slow, fragmented process of bringing photonic products to market with an integrated, rapid one, much as modern semiconductors are developed. James Lee has said the company is "somewhere between Cadence and Arm, for photonics" and that the goal is to democratise photonics development.
Wave Photonics is based in Cambridge, UK. In August 2025 it launched a PDK management platform, with the CORNERSTONE rapid-prototyping foundry as its first user. A process design kit, or PDK, is the rulebook a factory gives designers. The platform connects PDKs to the main chip design programs, including tools from Cadence, Siemens, Luceda and GDSFactory, and protects the factory's intellectual property. The company also announced a silicon nitride process for quantum photonics with a PDK in January 2025, and has taken part in an Innovate UK delegation to Taiwan to look for manufacturing partners.
A 2025 interview put the team at around 14 people, so it is small and each person has a wide remit. Founders with backgrounds in physics and in quantitative finance, such as Kubica, suggest a team that mixes science and computational skills. Lee is described there as using data-driven methods to manage manufacturing variability. The company also acquired the intellectual property of a co-packaged optics and transceiver company and says it is looking for electronics partners who want to combine photonics with electronics. Public posts from the company mention roles such as infrastructure engineers.
A design-software and IP company like this employs photonics and optics engineers, software and infrastructure engineers, mathematicians and data scientists, and technical sales, partnership and communications staff. It is a good example of how a hardware field also needs strong programmers: much of the work is writing software that predicts how light will behave in a chip before anything is manufactured.
Website: www.wavephotonics.com
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