Sylvie Menezo
Organisation: Scintil Photonics Role: Co-founder and CEO Based in: France and Canada Education: PhD in Optical transmission, Executive MBA
Scintil Photonics was set up in 2018 to advance and market a technology for integrating lasers onto silicon integrated circuits, which was developed at French research institute, CEA Leti. As its co- founder and CEO, Sylvie Menezo has played a key role in developing the technology, as well as growing the company and raising nearly €19 million since its inception (with €15 million raised in 2022). A fabless firm, Scintil Photonics’
Augmented Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit (IC) product is a single-chip solution consisting of active and passive components, all made entirely from standard silicon photonics processes available at CMOS commercial foundries, and where III-V optical amplifiers and lasers are integrated on the backside of advanced silicon photonic circuits. This unique all-in-one integration of amplifiers and lasers enables ultrahigh- speed communications, thanks to extensive parallelisation and higher bit rates, for example from 800G to 3,200Gbit/sec with very compact chips. Menezo first thought about a career
in research during her school years. The female science teachers she had at age 12-13 also worked as researchers, which sparked her interest in the field. ‘It’s very rare in France to have these types of profiles for teachers. It was really unique. And this made me think about doing the same. I wanted to do research.’ Menezo then studied semiconductor
material engineering at the French national institute of applied science, INSA Lyon. During this time, she completed industry placement in Boston, US, for a telecoms start-up. This is where she ‘fell in love with optical transmission’. She went back to France to study a PhD on this topic, which she completed in two years with the telecommunications company Orange (formerly France Télécom). This focused on the design, fabrication and characterisation of an integrated DWDM laser array at 1,550nm (distributed-feedback lasers and AWG cable), and resulted in two patents and winning best paper at the 1999 European Conference on Integrated Optics. Menezo then gained a significant amount of industry experience, working for seismic acquisition giant, Sercel, as head of its R&D optical lab for nine years. Here, she directly reported to the CTO and CEO and set up the lab from scratch, which developed and tested fibre optic sensing systems.
With an eye on setting up a business at some point in the future, while working in this role she also studied at weekends for a part-time executive MBA. Although she had gained industry experience, this had mostly been on the engineering side – so working and developing relationships with entrepreneurs was highly valuable. Menezo said: ‘It was a revelation during
that executive MBA to be working with commercial people. It was very different from what I was used to – and I learned a lot from it.’
In 2010, she joined CEA Leti for two
important reasons – because the institute has a favourable environment for building start-ups and it has a good reputation in silicon photonics research. She started in a junior position, as a research engineer, and then moved over to business development and took the role of business development, head of lab, research engineer. She led many programmes until she made a deal with CEA Leti to build a start-up in 2018, at which
"It was a revelation during that executive MBA to be working with commercial people. It was very different from what I was used to – and I learned a lot from it"
point she also met her business partner, Pascal Langlois. Soon after its inception, Scintil Photonics
won the i-Lab 2018, a French government- sponsored innovation competition. Now the company has 15 employees
and intends to start mass production by the second half of 2024. It is working on building its global industrialisation footprint and speeding up the commercialisation of its products in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.
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