gpu
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The compiler legend who wants to break AI free from a single chip
Chris Lattner built the compilers inside every iPhone and Mac. His next act, Modular, is a bet that AI shouldn't be chained to one company's chips - and Qualcomm just paid billions to own it.
Code Ocean
Code Ocean is a New York-based B2B SaaS platform that makes computational research reproducible, traceable and collaborative. Its flagship Compute Capsule bundles code, data and the exact software environment together so an analysis runs identically today or years from now. Used by pharma, biotech and leading research institutes, and integrated with journals like Nature and IEEE, Code Ocean is building a trusted virtual lab where both scientists and AI agents can run real analyses with full version control, lineage and compliance.
Daytona
Daytona builds programmatic, composable computers for AI agents. Its stateful sandboxes spin up in under 90 milliseconds, run untrusted AI-generated code in full isolation, and can be started, paused, or snapshotted on demand. Founded by Ivan Burazin and Vedran Jukic, the company pivoted from developer-environment management into agent-native infrastructure in 2025 and raised a $24M Series A led by FirstMark Capital in February 2026. Customers include LangChain, Writer, Turing, and SambaNova.
Inferact
Inferact is a Berkeley- and San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, the most widely used open-source engine for running large language models. The company commercializes vLLM - which at any moment powers inference on more than 400,000 GPUs worldwide - by funneling paid engineering resources back into the open project while building a next-generation commercial 'universal inference layer' meant to make AI inference cheaper and faster. Inferact launched publicly in January 2026 with a $150 million seed round at an $800 million valuation, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed.
OpenInfer
OpenInfer is a San Mateo-based AI infrastructure startup building an 'Inference OS for the agentic era' - software that runs large AI models and agents directly on the CPUs, GPUs and NPUs enterprises already own, from edge devices to private data centers, without cloud lock-in. Founded by ex-Meta and Roblox systems engineers Behnam Bastani and Reza Nourai, its OpenInfer Engine claims 2-3x faster inference than Llama.cpp and Ollama on distilled DeepSeek models and works as a drop-in replacement for existing endpoints. The company raised an $8M seed round in February 2025 and has since shipped Jean, a private email-native agentic AI system, and orchestration layers for heterogeneous compute.
RadixArk
RadixArk is an AI infrastructure company spun out of the team behind SGLang, the open-source inference engine that serves trillions of tokens a day for the likes of Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle and xAI. Founded by Ying Sheng and Banghua Zhu, RadixArk keeps SGLang and its reinforcement-learning framework Miles free and open while selling managed hosting and tooling on top, aiming to make building, training and running frontier models at least 10x cheaper and 10x more accessible. It launched publicly in May 2026 with a $100M seed round led by Accel and Spark Capital at a $400M valuation.
FriendliAI
FriendliAI is a San Francisco-based AI inference cloud built by the researchers who invented continuous batching - the technique now standard across the industry. Its platform serves open-weight and custom generative AI models in production with high throughput, lower GPU costs, and 99.99% reliability, used by customers including LG and Twelve Labs.
Gimlet Labs, Inc.
Gimlet Labs is a San Francisco applied research company building the first multi-silicon inference cloud - software that runs AI workloads simultaneously across CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators. Founded by ex-Google and ex-NVIDIA engineers behind the Pixie observability project, Gimlet ships Gimlet Cloud (serverless agent inference) and kforge (autonomous kernel generation from PyTorch). The company exited stealth in October 2025 with eight-figure revenue and raised an $80M Series A led by Menlo Ventures in March 2026.
ProjectX
ProjectX is a San Francisco-based, Y Combinator-backed startup building Infinity (InfinityOS) - a cloud-native, distributed operating system where every app runs on its own independent compute and GPU inside a single browser tab. Designed for the multi-agent, GPU-native era, it lets humans and AI agents run Blender, Unreal, Isaac Sim, DaVinci, and VS Code side-by-side in one shared workspace.
Coiled
Coiled is a lightweight cloud compute platform that lets Python users scale data science, machine learning, and AI workloads from a laptop to thousands of cloud machines without Docker or Kubernetes. Founded in 2020 by Matthew Rocklin, the creator of the open-source Dask library, Coiled runs inside a customer's own AWS, GCP, or Azure account, handling provisioning, autoscaling, environment replication, and cost visibility so data teams can run Dask clusters, serverless functions, and batch jobs with minimal friction.
Spiral
Spiral is a New York-based data infrastructure company building a database reimagined from the ground up for the AI era - what it calls the 'Third Age of Data,' when machines, not humans, are the primary consumers of data. Built on Vortex, an open-source columnar file format donated to the Linux Foundation, Spiral streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory, unifies governance across every data type from tiny embeddings to massive video, and aims to keep expensive GPUs saturated instead of idle. Founded by ex-Palantir and ex-Citadel engineers, it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
Anyscale
Anyscale is the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework used to train and serve some of the world's largest AI systems. Founded by the creators of Ray at UC Berkeley's RISELab, Anyscale provides a managed compute platform that lets enterprises scale Python and AI workloads across any cloud, with the performance of bare metal and the ergonomics of a notebook.
Armada
Armada is a San Francisco-based edge computing company that builds ruggedized, containerized data centers - the Galleon family and the megawatt-scale Leviathan - paired with Starlink connectivity and an AI orchestration platform. Its mission is to put AI and compute everywhere the cloud can't reach: oil rigs, mines, ships, forward operating bases, and remote industrial sites.
WEKA
WEKA builds a software-defined data platform engineered for AI and HPC workloads, feeding GPUs and CPUs with low-latency, high-throughput storage across on-prem, cloud, edge and hybrid environments. Its NeuralMesh architecture underpins hundreds of the world's largest AI deployments, including model builders, hyperscale neoclouds, and Fortune 50 enterprises.
FlexAI
FlexAI is a Paris-based AI infrastructure company building a 'universal AI compute' layer that lets teams deploy, train, and serve models across diverse GPU architectures and cloud providers without wrestling with the underlying hardware. Founded in 2023 by former Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, and Tesla veterans, it raised a $30M seed round in April 2024 and is positioning itself as Europe's answer to the GPU-as-a-service crunch.
Xscape Photonics Inc
Xscape Photonics is a Santa Clara-based deep-tech startup building next-generation silicon photonic solutions to solve the escape bandwidth crisis inside AI data centers. Founded in 2022 by a team of Columbia University researchers and industry veterans, the company's proprietary ChromX platform and FalconX laser module deliver multi-wavelength optical connectivity that can increase data throughput by 10x while cutting power by 10x compared to conventional solutions. Backed by $95 million in total funding from NVIDIA, Cisco, and others, Xscape is building the photonic fabric that will underpin the next generation of agentic AI infrastructure.
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform designed for developers, startups, and SMBs, offering simple, predictable pricing and powerful infrastructure from virtual machines to high-performance GPU instances. Known for its community-first approach and Hacktoberfest, it has grown into a $9.4B public company competing with hyperscalers by focusing on usability and AI democratization.
OctoAI
OctoAI (formerly OctoML) was a Seattle-based AI infrastructure company founded in 2019 by University of Washington researchers — including Apache TVM creator Tianqi Chen and CEO Luis Ceze. The company built a generative AI inference platform that gave developers fast, affordable API access to leading open-source LLMs and image generation models, along with OctoStack, an enterprise-grade private AI deployment stack. After raising ~$132M and pivoting from ML optimization to GenAI infrastructure, OctoAI was acquired by NVIDIA in September 2024 and wound down its commercial services by October 31, 2024.
Fireworks AI
Fireworks AI is a generative AI inference platform founded in 2022 by seven engineers — five of whom built PyTorch at Meta — that gives enterprises fast, cost-efficient, and customizable access to hundreds of open-source models. The company's proprietary FireAttention kernels and speculative-execution engine deliver up to 40× faster inference and 8× cost reduction versus alternatives, while its fine-tuning and model-deployment tooling lets companies own their AI stack end-to-end. With $327M+ raised, a $4B valuation, 10,000+ customers including Samsung, Uber, Shopify, and Cursor, and a $315M annualized run-rate as of early 2026, Fireworks AI has become the go-to inference layer for production generative AI applications.
Baseten
Baseten is a San Francisco-based AI inference infrastructure company that provides dedicated and serverless GPU compute for running AI models at scale. Founded in 2019 by four ex-Gumroad engineers, the company has grown into a unicorn with a $5B valuation and $585M in total funding, backed by NVIDIA and other top-tier investors. Baseten powers inference workloads for 100+ enterprises including Cursor, Notion, HeyGen, and Clay, offering an inference stack with near-zero cold starts, proprietary networking, and open-source tooling like Truss for model packaging.
RunPod
RunPod is an AI cloud infrastructure company that provides on-demand GPU compute for training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI/ML models. Founded in 2022 by two former Comcast engineers who pivoted their Ethereum mining rigs into AI servers, RunPod grew to $120M ARR with just $22M raised by early 2026, serving 500,000+ developers across 183 countries. Its marketplace model, per-second billing, and support for 30+ GPU SKUs — from consumer RTX 4090s to enterprise H100s and B200s — make it a capital-efficient disruptor to hyperscaler GPU clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure.