control-plane
(3)
Last9
Last9 is a unified observability company that helps engineering and DevOps teams monitor high-cardinality metrics, logs, and traces without the ballooning costs of legacy tools. Built around a Prometheus- and OpenTelemetry-compatible telemetry warehouse called Levitate and a pre-ingestion Control Plane that filters, reshapes, and routes data, Last9 has been used to observe some of the largest live-streaming events in the world - including peaks of roughly 59-61 million concurrent viewers. Founded in 2020 and backed by Sequoia/Peak XV's Surge, Better Capital and others, it targets cost-efficient, full-fidelity observability at enterprise scale.
Parallel Works
Parallel Works is a Chicago-based software company, spun out of Argonne National Laboratory in 2015, that builds ACTIVATE - a hybrid multi-cloud control plane for high-performance computing and AI. The platform gives researchers, engineers and defense teams a single interface to provision, orchestrate and share compute across on-premises clusters and the major clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle), with built-in cost governance, role-based access and security controls. In 2025 ACTIVATE's High Security Platform became the first hybrid multi-cloud solution to earn a U.S. Department of Defense IL5 Authority to Operate.
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.