rdma
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Gilad Shainer
Gilad Shainer is Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA, where he leads the strategy, marketing, and ecosystem development for the company's networking portfolio — including InfiniBand, Ethernet, DPUs, and interconnect technologies that power more than half the world's top 500 supercomputers. A Technion-trained electrical engineer who graduated Cum Laude at both B.Sc. and M.Sc. levels, Shainer spent nearly two decades at Mellanox Technologies before joining NVIDIA via the $6.9 billion acquisition in 2020. He founded the HPC-AI Advisory Council in 2008, which now spans 400+ organizations globally, co-founded the ISC Student Cluster Competition, holds two R&D 100 Awards (2015 and 2019), and has authored or co-authored dozens of papers across IEEE, ACM, and Springer venues. At a moment when AI factories are rewriting the rules of data center design, Shainer is the person making sure the wires — and the protocols running through them — are ready.
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.
DreamBig Semiconductor Inc.
DreamBig Semiconductor is a San Jose-based chiplet company building open silicon platforms that scale AI networking from 800 Gbps to 12.8 Tbps. Founded by Marvell veterans, the team is selling chiplets, a SuperNIC, and a chiplet hub aimed at AI data centers, automotive, and edge compute.
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.