Andrew Rickman

Andrew Rickman OBE (born c. 1960) is the founder, CEO and Chairman of Rockley Photonics based in the UK, Finland and Pasadena, CA. He was Britain’s first Internet billionaire, and a survivor of the dot-com bubble crash.

Rickman has a mechanical engineering degree from Imperial College, London; a PhD in silicon photonics from Surrey University, an MBA from Cranfield University and honorary doctorates from Surrey, Edinburgh Napier and Kingston Universities. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Physics.

Rickman founded Bookham Technology, in 1988, and he also served as its CEO and Chairman of the board. The company, which became Oclaro Inc., was the world's second largest fiber optics telecom component manufacturer. When the Bookham's share price reached its peak in the summer of 2000, Andrew owned more than £1.5bn. But he lost this money by the end of the year due to the dotcom bubble burst. Oclaro was acquired in 2018 by Lumentum Holdings Inc for $1.8 billion. Rickman grew the company from a start-up to a FTSE100 company and latterly chaired the business through the consolidation of the telecoms industry.

More recently he was Chairman of Kotura Inc., a developer of silicon photonics for fiber optic communications, high performance computing and sensing applications, and was instrumental in its development and ultimately successful sale for $82 million in 2013 to Mellanox Technologies, Ltd (NASDAQ: MLNX; TASE: MLNX), a supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions for servers and storage systems.

Rickman is the current CEO of start up Rockley Photonics. Founded in August 2013, Rockley Photonics has developed a complete silicon photonics platform for high-volume applications, including next-generation sensor systems and communications networks.

Rickman was appointed an OBE in the 2000 New Year Honours list for services to the telecommunications industry, and is a winner of the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for his outstanding contribution to British Engineering.

In 2000, Rickman was named UK Technology and Communications Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst and Young.

In 2011, Rickman was awarded an Honorary Professorship at SIMIT, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Rickman has held advisory board positions with the East Asia Institute of the University of Cambridge and Applied Science and Technology Research Institute of Hong Kong. He was a Trustee of The Oxford Trust. He was previously a council member of the UK Government’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Outside of silicon photonics and integrated communication technologies his interests lie in cutting edge developments in the fields of energy, the environment and new media.