Cfo Thought Leader

When Lisa Cummins Dulchinos joined Ayar Labs, she knew translating deep tech into a business story would be central to her role. At a company where 85% of the nearly 200 employees hold PhDs, Dulchinos found herself among experts fluent in micro-ring resonators and laser physics. To explain what Ayar Labs does, she took a different approach. “It’s basically a computer chip that allows us to open up the bandwidth in a computing system,” she tells us.That chiplet—named TeraPHY—replaces traditional copper wiring with optics, using lasers to transfer data more efficiently. Dulchinos describes it with a relatable analogy: “There’s traffic on a highway…you open up and add more lanes.” This optical solution not only alleviates the data bottleneck but also delivers measurable benefits: “It decreases the amount of power required by four to eight times, increases the bandwidth almost 10 times, [and] reduces latency,” she tells us.What drew Dulchinos to Ayar Labs is also what defines her leadership: the intersection of t