Leeds, 10 March 2026: Optalysys, a photonics company enabling the future of secure computing and sustainable AI, has appointed Rosario “Ro” Cammarota and Phil Cheetham to its Advisory Board, effective 1 March 2026. 

Ro is an established leader in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and secure AI systems, and former Chief Scientist at Intel. He founded and scaled Intel’s encrypted computing programme and led the development of the first advanced-node platform enabling FHE at scale. His expertise spans translating breakthrough cryptography into high-performance, deployable computing infrastructure. 

Phil brings deep expertise in cloud-based secure compute and large-scale infrastructure for AI and data-intensive applications. He is currently Group Head of Data Content at LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), responsible for sourcing and content across the group. Previously, he was Vice President, EC2 Instance Platforms at AWS, where he led the evolution of existing and introduction of new instance types for EC2, such as Graviton and Trainium. Phil has spent several years working with Optalysys, both as an advisor and a Non-Executive Board member. 

Earlier this year, Optalysys announced it had secured £23m to advance its photonic computing capabilities and US expansion. Its advances in silicon photonics brings massive efficiency gains to AI, high-performance and secure computing, telecoms and cryptography.  

FHE is one of its key application areas – a post-quantum-ready form of cryptography that allows data to be processed securely while remaining encrypted – a critical area of concern for the growth of secure AI, cloud and enterprise computing. 

Dr Nick New, CEO of Optalysys, said, “Ro and Phil bring outstanding and highly complementary expertise to our Board. Ro has been at the forefront of advancing FHE from theory to deployable platforms, while Phil offers deep insight into cloud-scale compute and the realities of adopting secure systems in the industries we’re prioritising. Their guidance will help us accelerate product and commercial execution to support next generation computing workloads – across AI, security, intelligence and discovery – and raise Optalysys’ profile in the US as we ramp up our international market presence.” 

Ro Cammarota said, “Optalysys is tackling one of the most important problems in secure AI: making computation on encrypted data practical at meaningful scale. I’m excited to join the Advisory Board and support the team as they translate their technology into deployable products and expand their impact globally.” 

Phil Cheetham said, “Optalysys is focused on solving one of the most challenging problems in confidential AI at scale.  Having worked with Optalysys over the past couple of years I have seen the strength of the technology and the team first-hand. As global demand grows for secure, sustainable, high-performance computing across all industry verticals, I’m delighted to join the Advisory Board and continue to help Optalysys.” 

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About Optalysys 

Founded in Leeds, UK, in 2013 by Dr. Nick New (CEO) and Robert Todd (CTO), Optalysys is a photonic computing company. Optalysys’ unique approach integrates data movement and processing on a single chip, combining silicon photonics with cutting-edge digital technologies to deliver immense computational power required for today’s workloads and next generation cloud infrastructure. Optalysys has built the world’s first dedicated hardware solution designed for encrypted blockchain applications — LightLocker™ Node.