hardware-acceleration
(7)
DualBird
DualBird is a Boston-based data infrastructure company building a cloud-native engine that brings hardware-grade acceleration to big data and AI workloads. By running rewritable FPGA silicon on AWS as a software service, DualBird plugs into existing Apache Spark and Apache Iceberg pipelines and claims 10-100x faster processing at 50-90% lower cost, without asking teams to change their code or workflows. The company raised $25M in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in November 2025.
Gilad Tal
Gilad Tal is co-founder and CEO of DualBird, a Boston-based deep tech startup rebuilding the foundation of analytics and AI data infrastructure by running silicon acceleration as cloud-native software. A Technion-trained electrical engineer and physicist with 14 years in ASIC and software development, he previously founded and led TerrainEDA, an EDA startup acquired by Synopsys. At DualBird he and his co-founders use rewritable FPGA hardware to plug into Apache Spark and Iceberg environments, claiming up to 100x faster performance and up to 90% lower cost with no changes to existing workflows.
Fabric Cryptography
Fabric Cryptography is a San Francisco hardware startup building the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) - a fully programmable custom-silicon chip with an instruction set designed specifically for advanced cryptography. Founded in 2021 by Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy, Fabric aims to do for cryptography what Nvidia did for AI: dramatically accelerate workloads like zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation compared with CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function accelerators. The company has raised $39M total, including a $33M Series A in August 2024 co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.
Grovf
Grovf is a deep-tech semiconductor startup building AI infrastructure backend networking - RDMA and chiplet IP, soft IP cores, and scale-out NICs that connect AI accelerator servers at 400/800Gbps with sub-2-microsecond latency. Founded in 2017 in Armenia by Artavazd Khachatryan and Khachik Sahakyan, the company began with FPGA-accelerated databases for the Industrial IoT and evolved into networking fabric for large-scale AI model training. Grovf was the first company from Armenia and the Caucasus to win an EU Horizon 2020 SME Instrument grant, and went through UC Berkeley's SkyDeck accelerator.
Khachik Sahakyan
Khachik Sahakyan is the co-founder and CEO of Grovf, a deep-tech hardware company building AI back-end fabric IP, chiplets and 400/800 Gbps SmartNICs that move data between AI accelerators with sub-2 microsecond RDMA latency. A microwave engineer and former Yerevan State University lecturer turned founder, he splits Grovf between Newark, California and Yerevan, Armenia, and has spent the last several years convincing data-center buyers that the path to scale is in silicon, not software.
Reiner Pope
Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, an AI chip startup based in Mountain View, California, designing purpose-built silicon for large language models. A former Google Senior Staff Software Engineer who led AI software development for Google's TPUs and served as Efficiency Lead for PaLM, Pope left Google one week before ChatGPT launched to build what he calls 'the best chips for LLMs that physics allows.' MatX has raised approximately $604M to date, including a $500M Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP, and is building a hybrid SRAM-HBM chip architecture targeting the world's leading AI labs.
Kanu Gulati
Kanu Gulati is a Partner at Khosla Ventures investing in enterprise AI, robotics, and autonomous systems. With a PhD in electrical engineering, over a decade as a research scientist at Intel and Cadence, and experience as a founding engineer at multiple acquired startups, she bridged from deep tech to venture capital through a cold email that landed her an internship at Khosla Ventures. An NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship recipient with 35+ peer-reviewed publications, three co-authored books, and an Erdős number of 3, she now leads investments in companies like Waabi, Genesis AI, and PolyAI.