high-performance-computing
(19)
Riot Platforms, Inc.
Riot spent years turning cheap electricity into Bitcoin. Now the same land, substations and cooling know-how are being repackaged for AI - a pivot that could make the power connection more valuable than the mine.
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.
Bitfury
For over a decade Bitfury built the picks and shovels of the Bitcoin economy - the chips, the cooling, the code. Now it is spending its winnings on the next wave of computing.
SkyeChip
SkyeChip is a Penang-based fabless semiconductor company that designs silicon intellectual property (IP) and custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Founded in 2019 by former Intel, Altera and Broadcom engineers, it specialises in advanced memory-interface IP (HBM3E, DDR5, LPDDR5/5x), UCIe die-to-die interconnect, network-on-chip fabrics and RISC-V CPU IP built on 6nm/7nm process nodes. Recognised as Malaysia's first homegrown AI chip designer, SkyeChip listed on Bursa Malaysia's Main Market in May 2026 in the country's largest IPO in 16 years.
Syenta
Syenta is an Australian deep-tech semiconductor company building next-generation chip-to-chip interconnects for the AI era. Spun out of the Australian National University, it has developed a proprietary process called Localized Electrochemical Manufacturing (LEM) that deposits and patterns metal in a single step, producing micron-scale interconnects across large packages with fewer process steps. The technology targets the 'memory wall' that limits AI and high-performance computing, aiming to raise interconnect density and bandwidth while cutting manufacturing cost and waste. Headquartered in Sydney with a new development facility in Tempe, Arizona, Syenta has raised more than A$37 million, with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joining its board.
Ayar Labs
Ayar Labs is a San Jose-based semiconductor company building optical input/output (I/O) technology that moves data between chips using light instead of copper. Its silicon-photonics chiplets - the TeraPHY optical engine and the SuperNova multi-wavelength light source - are designed to be co-packaged directly with GPUs and other processors, letting AI and high-performance-computing systems scale across thousands of accelerators with far higher bandwidth and far lower power than electrical interconnects. Spun out of a DARPA-funded university research effort, the company raised a $500M Series E in 2026 with backing from NVIDIA and AMD.
eTopus Technology
eTopus Technology is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company that designs ultra-high-speed, ADC/DSP-based SerDes and die-to-die interconnect IP for data centers, high-performance computing, AI, 5G and storage. Founded in 2012 by Harry Chan and Peter Kou, the company licenses silicon-proven PHY IP - spanning 112G on advanced 6/7nm nodes down to 22nm - plus chiplet interfaces supporting UCIe, Bunch of Wires, PCIe Gen 5/6 and CXL. eTopus positions itself on low latency and low power, and has built collaborative chiplet platforms with partners including QuickLogic, OpenFive and CoMira.
The San Francisco Compute Company
The San Francisco Compute Company (SF Compute) runs a real-time marketplace for AI compute. It buys and operates large-scale, vetted GPU clusters - primarily Nvidia H100s wired with 3.2Tb/s InfiniBand - and sells them on flexible contracts, from a single hour to multiple years, that buyers can also resell. By turning long-term GPU capacity into a liquid spot market with transparent pricing, SF Compute lets startups, researchers, and enterprises buy exactly the compute they need without the multi-year commitments that dominate the industry, while pointing toward a future of cash-settled GPU futures.
Simr (formerly UberCloud)
Simr, formerly UberCloud, is a Los Altos, California company that automates engineering simulation in the cloud. Its SimOps (Simulation Operations Automation) platform lets design engineers run compute-heavy simulations - CFD, FEA and multi-physics workloads - on any cloud or on-premise hardware with leading tools like Ansys, Siemens and Dassault, without wrestling with the underlying HPC infrastructure. Founded in 2014 by Burak Yenier and Wolfgang Gentzsch, the company raised a $20M Series A in 2024 and counts major manufacturers and tech giants among its users.
AheadComputing
AheadComputing is a Beaverton, Oregon semiconductor startup founded in 2024 by four former Intel CPU architects who left to build high-performance 64-bit RISC-V processor cores from a clean slate. Betting that the future bottleneck in AI and data-center computing is the CPU rather than the GPU, the company is designing a 'Big Core' out-of-order engine that maximizes per-core performance without the legacy baggage of x86. Backed by roughly $53M in seed funding from Eclipse, Toyota Ventures, Cambium and legendary chip designer Jim Keller, AheadComputing wants to prove that an open instruction set can deliver top-tier performance.
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.
Salt AI
Salt AI is a Los Angeles contextual-AI company building a visual platform that lets regulated enterprises - especially life sciences and healthcare teams - orchestrate many AI models into governed, auditable workflows that run inside their own infrastructure. Founded in 2023 by former Myspace CTO Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto, Salt lets biochemists and clinicians drag, drop, and chain models like AlphaFold2 (which Salt runs 22x faster), ProteinMPNN, and Chroma without writing code, turning months of pipeline engineering into weeks while keeping every prompt, weight, and response logged for compliance.
Sentieon
Sentieon builds ultra-fast, highly accurate software for analyzing DNA and RNA sequencing data. Its pipelines - DNAseq, DNAscope, TNseq, and TNscope - replace the open-source GATK workflow with matching or better accuracy while running many times faster on ordinary CPUs, no specialized hardware required. Founded in 2014 and based in the Bay Area, the company has won top honors in multiple precisionFDA and DREAM challenges, and its tools are used by pharma, clinical labs, sequencing platform makers, and genomics researchers worldwide to turn raw reads into trustworthy variant calls quickly and cheaply.
Zeromatter
Zeromatter builds the simulation infrastructure that autonomous-systems companies use to develop, test and validate their products before they ever touch the real world. Founded by former Tesla Autopilot simulation lead Ian Glow, its platform combines high-fidelity sensor simulation, automatic environment generation, multi-agent co-simulation frameworks, execution infrastructure and developer tooling into one system - aimed at making simulation a default tool for autonomy, aerospace, automotive, agriculture, drones and green energy.
Leostream Corporation
Leostream Corporation is a Boston-based software company that builds a vendor-neutral connection broker and remote desktop access platform. Its software maps end users to the right computing resource - a desktop, workstation, or GPU instance - whether that resource lives in a data center, on a physical machine, or across AWS, Azure, and OpenStack clouds. Founded in 2002 and led since 2016 by CEO Karen Gondoly, Leostream serves financial services, government and defense, media and entertainment, and oil and gas customers who need secure, single-pane management of hybrid work environments. Its platform won an Engineering Emmy in 2022.
Lightelligence
Lightelligence builds photonic and optoelectronic hybrid computing hardware that moves and processes AI data with light instead of electrons. Spun out of MIT in 2017 on the back of a landmark Nature Photonics paper, the company designs silicon-photonics chips, optical interconnects, and AI accelerators aimed at the bandwidth and energy bottlenecks of modern data centers. In April 2026 it listed in Hong Kong as the world's first AI silicon-photonics chip stock, jumping roughly 400% on debut.
Ferric, Inc.
Ferric, Inc. is a New York semiconductor company that builds integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) - complete DC-DC power converters with thin-film magnetic inductors built directly into the chip. By shrinking power conversion down to silicon that can sit inside a processor package, Ferric cuts board space and bill-of-materials while improving energy efficiency, targeting the punishing power demands of AI accelerators, high-performance computing, and hyperscale data centers.
Rescale
Rescale is a San Francisco-based digital engineering platform that turns high-performance computing into an on-demand cloud utility. Founded in 2011 by ex-Boeing engineer Joris Poort and Adam McKenzie, it gives scientists and engineers at companies like Samsung, Arm, General Motors Motorsports, and the U.S. Department of Defense a single workbench for simulation, AI physics, and multi-cloud orchestration.
Lightmatter
Lightmatter is building a photonic supercomputer. The Mountain View company uses light, not electrons, to move data between AI chips - tackling the bandwidth and energy wall that's about to crash into the next generation of data centers. Its Passage interconnect and Envise processor aim to connect millions of chips at the speed of light.