Andrew Rickman

Andrew Rickman OBE is an entrepreneur in the field of silicon photonics. He is the founder, and was executive chairman and chief executive officer of Rockley Photonics based in the UK. As CEO, he took Rockley Photonics public through a SPAC merger with a valuation of over one billion dollars in 2021 and the company went private again in 2023. He was Britain’s first Internet billionaire.

Education
Rickman has a mechanical engineering degree from Imperial College, London; a PhD in silicon photonics from Surrey University (supervisor: Professor Graham Reed) an MBA from Cranfield University and honorary doctorates from Surrey, Edinburgh Napier and Kingston Universities. He is a Chartered Engineer.

Career and business ventures
Rickman was previously the CEO and Chairman of Bookham Technology, the first company to commercialise silicon photonics. He founded Bookham Technology in 1988, and it grew rapidly from a start-up to a FTSE100 company before its valuation crashed as the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. Intel was an early investor in Bookham and Gordon Moore was involved.

Rickman was also Chairman of Kotura Inc., a silicon photonics company which is now part of Nvidia.

Honours and awards
Rickman was awarded an OBE 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.

Other achievements
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.