Principals
Derek W. Bailey
Founder, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of the BoardDerek W. Bailey is the founder of True Photonic, Inc. He leads a multi-entity structure: True Photonic for core intellectual property and the platform, SkyLight Holdings for Clean Compute Center infrastructure, and True Photonic Ventures for vertical applications.
He has been an entrepreneur for more than four decades, building businesses across hospitality, real estate, insurance, temporary staffing, and technology. His ventures include OnPoint Staffing, Curbside Chef, International Broadband Technologies, Popa Media, and the development of the patented Counterpoise engine. He is also the founder of Derek Automotive Technologies.
His twenty-seven-year partnership with Del Wolverton has produced multiple patents across several ventures. When Dr. Gary Poovey entrusted the two of them with his breakthrough materials science, Bailey structured True Photonic around a promise: to build an ethical company that shares value with the communities hosting its infrastructure. That promise governs how the company approaches counties, utilities, and sovereign partners today.
He is the author of Keep Computing: How Light Solves Computing's Impossible Problem (2026) and publishes at substack.com/@derekwbailey. He was born in New Orleans and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr. Gary Poovey
Chief Science OfficerDr. Gary Poovey is the company's chief scientist for photonics. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Plasma Physics from Eurotechnical Research University and a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from San Francisco State University. He invented the material that the light-activated light switch operates on, and co-developed with Del Wolverton the logic element the company calls the Poovey Switch.
His career runs more than twenty-five years in semiconductor process engineering. He managed process improvement teams that produced a novel fiber optic switch chip, and at Bullen Semiconductor he handled the chamber-part production that supplied Lam Research and Applied Materials etchers. A quarter century inside working fabs gave him an intimate understanding of why earlier attempts at photonic computing stalled. He holds eight granted United States patents covering core photonic switching, light-actuated switching, and related materials science.
Before the current architecture existed he designed seventeen distinct photonic switching structures, two of which, when tested, switched light at least twenty times faster than a transistor. He demonstrated that lead zirconate titanate, a piezoelectric material, responds to the electric field of light.
Dr. Poovey directs the scientific work of the company and leads first-generation chip development, the translation of validated switch physics into a manufacturable chip architecture under the Relaxed Lithography™ constraint.
Del Wolverton
Chief Technology OfficerDel Wolverton is a Navy-trained electrical engineer who served as a Senior Chief, with career-long expertise in fiber optics and optical switching. He ran the tiger teams for the United States Navy, the units pulled together to take on technical problems that had resisted the normal process, and he served as a United States military technical advisor to foreign governments, with decades of experience in defense systems.
His work traces the arc of high-frequency signal processing, from military radar electronics and guidance systems through decades in fiber-optic switching and RF architecture. He founded and exited two companies in that space, Space Microwave and SpectraSwitch, building the former from concept through acquisition and developing fiber optic switching technology that shipped in commercial telecommunications systems.
Wolverton co-developed the Poovey Switch with Dr. Poovey and owns hardware architecture and patent claim development across the estate. He is the architect of the engineering framework that carries the physics into deployable systems. The chief technology role here is an operating one: it carries responsibility for turning validated physics into a working chip, a functioning fabrication path, and compute centers that run.
Mark Newland
Lab Head, PxDx · Product DevelopmentMark Newland leads all product development and heads PxDx, the company laboratory. His career runs more than four decades and combines technical depth with executive leadership.
At SanDisk Corporation he served in several leadership roles including Director of Systems Engineering, guiding teams through software development, product integration, and new product introductions, and raising production yields from 20 percent to more than 85 percent on key product lines. Earlier, at IBM, he held roles in service delivery and project management, refining infrastructure and introducing ITIL-aligned process improvements across enterprise systems.
He has taught computer science and network technology at Emmaus Bible College and Barclay College, and founded the Information Network Technology Program at Pratt Community College. He holds a B.S. in applied mathematics and computer science from Cal Poly and an MBA in computer information systems from National University.
Seth Poovey
Senior EngineerSeth Poovey leads the Finite-Difference Time-Domain electromagnetic simulation work that tests photonic system performance at each stage of development. FDTD is the computational method used to predict how a photonic structure will behave before it is built, and it is the discipline that stands between a component on paper and a committed substrate. His work confirms that every photonic element in the stack performs as designed before anything goes to fabrication, which keeps the cost of a wrong assumption in simulation time instead of wafer runs.
The role sits between the physics directed by Dr. Poovey and the engineering carried by Del Wolverton and Mark Newland, and it draws on both. Alongside the simulation work he brings photonic circuit design, IT systems, and cloud architecture.
