data-movement
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Baya Systems
AI chips are getting better at arithmetic and worse at waiting. Baya Systems is building the configurable on-chip roads - and the software map - meant to keep data moving before a costly design becomes silicon.
Cspeed
Cspeed is a Palo Alto optical semiconductor startup building silicon photonics and high-density III-V laser array technology to replace copper interconnects inside large-scale AI clusters. Founded in 2022 and led by serial semiconductor entrepreneur Sanjai Kohli, the company targets the data-movement bottlenecks that limit 'scale-up' AI infrastructure, aiming to deliver fiber-optic connectivity dense and cheap enough for high-volume datacenter deployment.
Polytomic
Polytomic is a San Francisco data-movement company that unifies ETL, Reverse ETL, and CDC streaming in a single platform, letting teams keep data warehouses, databases, and SaaS tools in sync without maintaining brittle one-off pipelines. Founded in 2019 by former PlanGrid engineers Ghalib Suleiman and Nathan Yergler and backed by Y Combinator, it pairs a no-code interface for business teams with SQL, monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code controls for data engineers.
MIPS
MIPS is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company with a 40-year heritage in RISC computing. After abandoning its own legacy architecture, MIPS reinvented itself around the open RISC-V instruction set and now builds compute subsystems for autonomous platforms across automotive, industrial, robotics, and edge AI markets. Its Atlas portfolio - spanning Sense, Think, Act, and Communicate building blocks - targets the low-latency, safety-critical demands of what the company calls Physical AI. In July 2025, GlobalFoundries announced a deal to acquire MIPS.