# Matthew Shaxted

> Matthew Shaxted is the founder and CEO of Parallel Works, a Chicago company that turns the headache of running heavy AI, machine learning, and simulation workloads across clouds and on-premises systems into a single control plane. A civil engineer who once wired 30 Linux desktops into a render farm to push building simulations, he met co-founder Michael Wilde at Argonne National Laboratory and spun the lab's parallel-workflow technology into a company in 2015. Bootstrapped and cash-flow positive, Parallel Works now powers hurricane risk models, cancer research, space-weather digital twins, and IL5-authorized defense workloads.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Parallel Works
- **Organizations:** Parallel Works, Argonne National Laboratory, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Civil Engineering (architectural concentration), Northwestern University
- **Known for:** Founded and bootstrapped Parallel Works into a profitable, cash-flow-positive company, Commercialized Argonne National Laboratory parallel-workflow technology into an enterprise control plane, Won, with Argonne, the Federal Laboratory Consortium's highest honor for excellence in technology transfer

## Career timeline

- **pre-2010** — Computational designer at architecture and engineering firms including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, running energy, solar, structural, and fluid-dynamics simulations for Chicago skyscrapers and campuses
- **~2010** — Built a render farm from 30 networked Linux desktops to handle growing simulation loads, pulling him into high-performance computing
- **pre-2015** — Worked at Argonne National Laboratory on parallel-workflow technology with Michael Wilde
- **2015** — Co-founded Parallel Works (June 2015) to commercialize Argonne's parallel-workflow technology and democratize HPC
- **2017** — Launched an 'app store' for HPC workflows; early seed funding round
- **2020** — Reached product-market fit
- **2021** — Signed first federal customer, NOAA
- **2022** — Multi-cloud expansion across AWS, GCP, and Azure; secured a major government contract
- **2023** — Built a high-security Department of Defense platform
- **2024** — Relaunched commercial product ACTIVATE; named a Top Cloud Platform by HPCwire

## Achievements

- Founded and bootstrapped Parallel Works into a profitable, cash-flow-positive company
- Commercialized Argonne National Laboratory parallel-workflow technology into an enterprise control plane
- Won, with Argonne, the Federal Laboratory Consortium's highest honor for excellence in technology transfer
- Built an IL5-authorized, DISA provisional-authorization platform for defense workloads
- Landed NOAA, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Orion Space Solutions as customers
- Recognized as a Top Cloud Platform by HPCwire (2024)

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Featured in Authority Magazine on pushing the boundaries of AI and platform thinking
- **2026-06** — Q&A with citybiz on democratizing HPC and AI and solving hybrid multi-cloud challenges

## Links

- Website: https://parallelworks.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-shaxted
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUUMr1dxOqo

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/matthew-shaxted
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-22