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Their ambitious journey wasn't without stumbling blocks. The duo undertook the task of creating a chip that demonstrated significant processing power—capable of achieving up to seven teraflops, or seven trillion floating-point operations per second. Yet, despite these impressive numbers, they encountered scalability issues. The performance metrics became less favorable as they attempted to scale their design for industry-level applications.

Ultimately, they made the tough decision to shelve their initial startup, recognizing that the current ecosystem could not fully leverage the promises of photonic computing without addressing certain technological limitations, such as the integration of photonic memory and mitigation of data loss during transmission.

## Competition and Market Dynamics