Vaysh Kewada

Vaysh Kewada grew up in Zimbabwe and studied Physics at Imperial College London, earning both a BSc and MSci. She went on to work as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company before joining Oxford Sciences Enterprises as an Entrepreneur in Residence, where she spent 18 months working alongside the academic founders of what would become Salience Labs — developing the commercial strategy and company structure before the spin-out. She also holds three patent publications from an earlier role at IBM.

Vaysh co-founded Salience Labs in 2021 as a joint spin-out of the Universities of Oxford and Münster, commercialising a novel brain-inspired photonic switch technology published in the journal Nature in 2020. As CEO she has led the company from spin-out through seed and Series A, raising a total of over $45 million and building a team of more than 50 people. Salience Labs develops silicon photonics hardware that enables all-optical networking between AI compute nodes — addressing the fundamental bandwidth and latency bottlenecks in large-scale AI datacentre infrastructure.

The company's $30 million Series A in 2025 was led by ICM HPQC Fund and Applied Ventures (the VC arm of Applied Materials), with participation from Cambridge Innovation Capital, Oxford Sciences Enterprises, and semiconductor leaders including Jalal Bagherli. Salience Labs has been recognised as a Sifted leading UK startup beyond London and recently announced a strategic collaboration with Keysight Technologies.