Patrick Bowen

Dr. Patrick T. Bowen has spent over a decade turning science fiction into billion-dollar industries.

As a graduate student and contractor working out of Duke University's legendary Metamaterials Group under Professor David Smith, Bowen co-designed the foundational technology for several companies that define their markets. He was an early contributor to Lumotive, replacing prohibitively expensive mechanical LiDAR with a chip the size of a postage stamp that steers light electronically. His work on flat-panel antenna designs enabled OneWeb to offer broadband internet on airplanes before Starlink even entered aviation.

Bowen was instrumental in the development of submarine sonar cloaking and invisibility materials for select frequencies. After graduating, he co-founded Metacept with Professor Smith, building products for DARPA and spinning out companies with technologies ranging from through-wall imagers to satellite sensors that pierce through clouds at night.

In 2020, Bowen founded Neurophos to tackle the most important bottleneck: AI compute. Using the same metamaterials principles that powered his earlier work, the company successfully developed a novel photonic “transistor” that enables it to build a chip that performs AI computations at the speed of light. Neurophos recently closed a 3x oversubscribed $100M+ Series A led by Gates Frontier representing a 20× valuation increase.