A GPU database made an hour-long telecom query run in under 50 seconds. SQream’s larger wager is that enterprises will stop shrinking their questions to fit their computers.
SoftBank Investment Advisers manages the biggest technology funds the world has ever seen. After a decade of writing nine-figure checks into startups, it is now pointing that firepower at one thing: the full stack of artificial intelligence.
The crypto-mining startup that became the picks-and-shovels supplier of the AI boom - renting Nvidia GPUs to the labs building the future, one megacluster at a time.
NVIDIA's first graphics chip tried to do too much. The company survived by abandoning it, then spent two decades making a graphics processor useful to everyone from gamers to AI labs.
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.
Oath Surgical is a Portland, Oregon-based healthtech company building a full-stack, AI-native system for outpatient surgery. It owns and operates its own ambulatory surgical centers while developing OathOS, an ambient clinical intelligence platform that analyzes surgical video, audio and operational data in real time to reduce administrative burden and support value-based, surgeon-led care. Founded by physician and former Intuitive Ventures head Oliver Keown, the company has raised roughly $35M and partners with NVIDIA, McKesson Ventures and FPV Ventures.
Point2 Technology is a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor company building ultra-low-power, low-latency interconnect chips and cables for AI/ML data centers. Its e-Tube platform sends data as radio-frequency signals through plastic waveguides - a third path between copper and optics - and its smart-retimer SoCs power 800G and 1.6T active electrical cables. Founded in 2016 by a KAIST professor and veterans of Marvell, Finisar and Samsung, the company has drawn investment from NVIDIA's NVentures, Bosch Ventures, Molex and UMC.
humans& is a human-centric frontier AI lab based in the San Francisco Bay Area, founded in September 2025 by researchers and builders from xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Stanford. Rather than building AI to replace people, the company designs models and products around how humans connect, communicate, and work together - investing in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding. It launched publicly in January 2026 with a $480 million all-cash seed round at a roughly $4.48 billion valuation, backed by NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, and Emerson Collective.
MetalSoft is a Chicago-based infrastructure software company that turns racks of physical servers, switches, and storage into cloud-like, self-service infrastructure. Its CloudPlex platform automates the full lifecycle of multi-vendor bare metal hardware - discovery, OS and firmware deployment, network fabric configuration, and storage - so enterprises and service providers can provision dedicated infrastructure on demand via a UI or API. Spun out of cloud hosting company Hostway in 2019 and led by serial founder Lucas Roh, MetalSoft raised a $16M Series A in December 2022 and has since pivoted hard toward orchestrating GPU clusters and 'AI factories' for telcos, data center operators, and Fortune 500 enterprises.
Skild AI is a Pittsburgh-based robotics company building the Skild Brain, a single general-purpose foundation model designed to control any robot - quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms, mobile manipulators - across many tasks without bespoke retraining. Founded in 2023 by former Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, the company trains on a mix of large-scale simulation, internet video, teleoperation and real-world deployment data. After a $1.4B Series C in January 2026, Skild AI is valued at over $14 billion.
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.
GMI Cloud is an AI-native GPU cloud built around NVIDIA's H100 and H200 accelerators. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Mountain View, it sells on-demand and reserved GPU compute, an orchestration layer (Cluster Engine), and a low-latency Inference Engine to AI labs and enterprises building generative models. In 2025 NVIDIA named it one of seven Reference Platform Cloud Partners worldwide.

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.