Dr. Venkat Mattela is the Founder and CEO of Ceremorphic, Inc., a San Jose-based deep-tech company designing ultra-low-power AI supercomputing chips built on TSMC's 5nm process. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD in Electrical Engineering, he previously founded Redpine Signals and sold its wireless connectivity division to Silicon Labs for $308 million in 2020. With over 100 patents and four decades in semiconductor engineering, Mattela is now betting Ceremorphic's proprietary ThreadArch architecture can reshape AI computing for data centers, drug discovery, and next-generation HPC workloads.
Gavin Uberti is the co-founder and CEO of Etched, a Cupertino-based AI chip startup building the world's first transformer-specific ASIC called Sohu. A Harvard dropout and 2024 Thiel Fellow, Uberti co-founded Etched in 2022 alongside Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen after betting that transformer architecture would dominate AI for years to come. That bet has paid off spectacularly: Etched has raised over $625 million (including a $500M round in January 2026 at a $5 billion valuation), and Sohu claims to run transformer inference 20x faster than Nvidia's H100 at a fraction of the cost - positioning Etched as one of the most serious challengers to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute.