Piris Labs — Inference & Compute Platform

Piris Labs is building a full-stack inference service that eliminates the AI data movement bottleneck using proprietary photonic (optical) hardware paired with an optimized software stack. Part of YC W2026, it was founded by Ali Khalatpour (CEO, MIT-trained optical scientist who developed the first room-temperature terahertz semiconductor laser) and Keyvan Moghadam (President, ex-Meta and ex-Twitter infrastructure).

The core thesis is that memory bandwidth — not compute — is the real bottleneck in AI inference, and optical interconnects can solve this at the physics layer. They claim 5x lower latency, 10x lower power per bit, and 2x lower cost per token compared to conventional GPU-based inference. The company has a working prototype of their Pi Conversion Engine and an SBIR government partnership.

This is a deep-tech hardware play competing with Cerebras, Groq, and SambaNova, taking a vertically integrated approach by building both hardware and software rather than selling components. They are targeting trillion-parameter model inference with a fundamentally different architecture.