bare-metal
(7)
CoreWeave
The crypto-mining startup that became the picks-and-shovels supplier of the AI boom - renting Nvidia GPUs to the labs building the future, one megacluster at a time.
Evocative
Evocative is a Los Angeles-based digital infrastructure provider that delivers enterprise-grade colocation, bare metal servers, carrier-neutral network, and managed services. Built largely through acquisition, its footprint spans roughly 20 data centers and dozens of Points of Presence across strategically located North American, European, and Asian metros. Evocative positions itself as a carrier-neutral, edge-ready alternative to the largest colocation operators, giving enterprises and service providers full control over performance, connectivity, and scaling for workloads that increasingly include AI.
Blacksmith
Blacksmith is a San Francisco-based developer-tools startup building a high-performance CI cloud. Its drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners boots each job into a Firecracker microVM on bare-metal gaming CPUs, letting engineering teams run their pipelines up to 2x faster at roughly half the cost. Backed by Y Combinator and Google Ventures, Blacksmith serves thousands of engineering teams - including Vercel, Supabase, Mercury, Clerk and Ashby - and pairs raw compute with observability and security tooling built specifically for CI workloads.
MetalSoft
MetalSoft is a Chicago-based infrastructure software company that turns racks of physical servers, switches, and storage into cloud-like, self-service infrastructure. Its CloudPlex platform automates the full lifecycle of multi-vendor bare metal hardware - discovery, OS and firmware deployment, network fabric configuration, and storage - so enterprises and service providers can provision dedicated infrastructure on demand via a UI or API. Spun out of cloud hosting company Hostway in 2019 and led by serial founder Lucas Roh, MetalSoft raised a $16M Series A in December 2022 and has since pivoted hard toward orchestrating GPU clusters and 'AI factories' for telcos, data center operators, and Fortune 500 enterprises.
Lucas Roh
Lucas Roh is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist who founded and runs MetalSoft, a Chicago-based startup whose software automates bare metal data centers - turning racks of multi-vendor switches, servers, and storage into cloud-like, on-demand infrastructure. A former Argonne National Laboratory researcher in automatic differentiation, he built the global web host Hostway (1998-2013), launched the big data cloud Bigstep, and spun MetalSoft out of Hostway's internal tooling in 2019. In December 2022 MetalSoft raised a $16 million Series A led by DNS Capital.
Spectro Cloud
Spectro Cloud is a San Jose-based enterprise software company that builds Palette, a Kubernetes management platform used to run, secure and scale containerized workloads, AI infrastructure and GPU clusters across cloud, data center, bare metal and edge environments. Founded in 2019 by Cisco/Cliqr veterans, it counts GE HealthCare, T-Mobile, Nokia and the U.S. Air Force and Navy among its customers and closed a $75M Series C in November 2024 led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs.
Derek Garnier
Derek Garnier is the CEO of Evocative, a global digital infrastructure provider headquartered in Los Angeles, California. With over 35 years in the industry, he has built, operated, and sold multiple companies across data centers, fiber networks, and managed services. A former engineer turned strategist, Garnier co-founded Arcadian Infracom, led Layer42 Networks through a successful acquisition by Wave Broadband in 2015, and returned to Evocative as CEO in February 2023. He champions hybrid cloud, AI-ready infrastructure, and inclusion as core business pillars, guiding Evocative through a significant debt financing round in December 2025 to expand high-density colocation and network capacity for next-generation AI applications.