MatX is a Mountain View semiconductor company building chips designed exclusively for large language models. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google TPU engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, it aims to deliver an order-of-magnitude more performance-per-dollar for frontier model training and inference than current GPUs.
Kamran Maniar is the Chief Executive Officer at Flux (flux.ai), the AI-powered PCB design platform headquartered in San Francisco. Flux - backed by 8VC and Bain Capital Ventures - has raised $39 million in total funding and serves over one million hardware builders across the globe, making professional circuit board design as accessible as writing a prompt. Operating at the intersection of AI, electronics, and manufacturing, Maniar leads from the crossroads of Silicon Valley ambition and Pakistan's deep engineering talent.
DreamBig Semiconductor is a San Jose-based chiplet company building open silicon platforms that scale AI networking from 800 Gbps to 12.8 Tbps. Founded by Marvell veterans, the team is selling chiplets, a SuperNIC, and a chiplet hub aimed at AI data centers, automotive, and edge compute.
Kargo is a San Francisco-based AI company building computer vision systems for warehouse loading docks. Its Kargo Tower and Kargo Lift hardware capture freight as it moves, reading labels, flagging damage, and feeding accurate, real-time inventory data into enterprise systems.
Lightmatter is building a photonic supercomputer. The Mountain View company uses light, not electrons, to move data between AI chips - tackling the bandwidth and energy wall that's about to crash into the next generation of data centers. Its Passage interconnect and Envise processor aim to connect millions of chips at the speed of light.
Positron AI designs purpose-built inference hardware for transformer models, aiming to make Nvidia GPUs optional for running large language models at production scale. Its first product, Atlas, ships from US fabs and claims roughly 3x lower latency and 4x better performance-per-watt versus an H100 system.
Sailesh Kumar is the founder and CEO of Baya Systems, a Santa Clara startup building unified fabric and chiplet interconnect software for AI silicon. A former Intel Fellow and the co-founder of NetSpeed Systems (acquired by Intel in 2018), he holds more than 150 patents and is among the most-cited engineers in network-on-chip design.
Sohail Syed is the CEO, President, and co-founder of DreamBig Semiconductor, a San Jose-based fabless chip startup he built into a chiplet platform pioneer before its $265M acquisition by Arm in October 2025. A serial entrepreneur from Pakistan who attended NED University and later earned an MBA from Cornell, Syed previously founded Questarium (acquired by Marvell) and FIRQuest (acquired by Corigine), and at Marvell helped grow a network switches business to $4 billion in revenue across 10 successful chip tapeouts. DreamBig's MARS Open Chiplet Platform - unveiled at CES 2024 - democratizes silicon development for AI, data centers, automotive, and edge computing, and the company raised $75M in a Samsung-led Series B in July 2024 before the Arm deal closed.