networking-chips
(3)
Rochan Sankar
Rochan Sankar is the founder and CEO of Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley startup building networking silicon to move data between the GPUs, CPUs and memory that power large-scale AI. A 26-year semiconductor veteran who ran Broadcom's data center Ethernet switching business before striking out on his own in 2019, he bet the company on a single idea: that AI's real bottleneck is not compute but the plumbing that feeds it. In September 2025, Nvidia paid more than $900 million to license Enfabrica's technology and bring Sankar and much of his team in-house.
Enfabrica
Enfabrica is a Silicon Valley chip startup building the networking and memory plumbing that lets tens of thousands of GPUs behave like one giant computer. Its Accelerated Compute Fabric SuperNIC (ACF-S) moves data at 3.2 terabits per second, and its EMFASYS memory fabric lets AI clusters borrow cheap DDR5 DRAM over Ethernet instead of buying more GPUs for capacity. Founded in 2019 by ex-Broadcom and Google networking engineers, the company raised roughly $290M before Nvidia paid over $900M in September 2025 to license its technology and hire CEO Rochan Sankar and much of his team.
Sohail Syed
Sohail Syed is the CEO, President, and co-founder of DreamBig Semiconductor, a San Jose-based fabless chip startup he built into a chiplet platform pioneer before its $265M acquisition by Arm in October 2025. A serial entrepreneur from Pakistan who attended NED University and later earned an MBA from Cornell, Syed previously founded Questarium (acquired by Marvell) and FIRQuest (acquired by Corigine), and at Marvell helped grow a network switches business to $4 billion in revenue across 10 successful chip tapeouts. DreamBig's MARS Open Chiplet Platform - unveiled at CES 2024 - democratizes silicon development for AI, data centers, automotive, and edge computing, and the company raised $75M in a Samsung-led Series B in July 2024 before the Arm deal closed.