santa-clara
(53)National 1st Credit Union outgrew its name
Born inside National Semiconductor, National 1st became part of PremierOne in 2013. Its history turns on a practical question: how do you keep banking personal when convenience keeps getting more expensive?
Purple Iris Communications and the business of making expertise readable
A former journalist’s B2B agency turns technical knowledge into something people can use. A six-week ESG assignment shows how much of that job happens before the sentences shine.
Naveen Palavalli Learned Security in Code. Now He Sells Its Next Vocabulary.
After 26 years moving from distributed systems to product strategy and global marketing, Cyera's CMO is betting that the defining AI-security argument begins with the data underneath it.
Versa Networks Is Selling Less Network - and That’s the Point
The Santa Clara company built one operating system for the jobs enterprises once handed to a small army of routers, firewalls and cloud-security tools. The bet works when consolidation beats specialization - and when the migration team does the unglamorous teaching.
Humayun Sohel Built the Invisible Systems - Then Built a Business Around Them
Before cloud migration became a boardroom phrase, Humayun Sohel was working closer to the machine. His path from embedded systems and optical-network firmware to Questivity offers a useful lesson in turning technical depth into practical judgment.
Anjali Yadav and the Quiet Machinery Behind a Tech Company
Her public footprint is spare, but the work around it is substantial: people, process and the long operational shift from IT consulting to enterprise AI.
Rajiv Pendyala Built a Career in the Work Between the Software and the Sale
For three decades, Rajiv Pendyala has worked the seam where technical projects meet commercial trust. His long tenure at Infotech Spectrum offers a practical study in the quiet machinery of IT services.
Intel
The company that built the microprocessor is trying to build something harder: a second act. Inside Intel's bet-the-house pivot from selling chips to making everyone else's.
Applied Materials
The company behind the machines that build almost every chip you own - and the atomic-scale materials engineering that keeps Moore's Law alive.
Steve Arnold
Steve Arnold is the CEO of E-Line Media, the video game developer and publisher behind the BAFTA- and Peabody-winning Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Beyond Blue, and the upcoming Never Alone 2 and Neighborhoods. He has been making games professionally since 2003, starting at Electronic Arts, where he rose from production intern on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series to Executive Producer working across EA Partners and the Origin store, with credits on Rock Band, The Beatles: Rock Band and Alice: Madness Returns. In May 2014 he joined Oculus, becoming Head of Oculus Studios in June 2016 and running the company's first-party and partner content slate through November 2019, a period covering Lone Echo, Robo Recall, The Climb, Chronos and Journey of the Gods, with partnerships spanning Epic, Insomniac, Ubisoft, Marvel and Lucasfilm. He then founded his own studio, Imagination Games, and ToyChest.AI, an early-stage venture using computer vision to let ordinary physical toys unlock content in games without special hardware. At E-Line he now leads a studio whose work sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has reached more than 25 million players.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Marvell Technology
Marvell Technology is a Santa Clara-based fabless semiconductor company that designs the chips underpinning modern data infrastructure. Founded in 1995, it has pivoted under CEO Matt Murphy from consumer and mobile silicon into custom AI accelerators (XPUs), electro-optics, high-speed Ethernet switching, DSPs and storage controllers. Its parts move data inside and between the hyperscale data centers run by companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, making it one of the key merchant and custom silicon suppliers powering the AI buildout.
Global Apps Inc
Global Apps Inc is a Santa Clara-based business and IT consulting firm focused on enterprise cloud and AI implementation. Founded in 2016 by CEO Srikanth P, it helps Fortune 100 and mid-market clients modernize on platforms like Salesforce, Google Cloud, and IBM Watson through a shared-risk delivery model that pairs Silicon Valley architects with senior engineering teams in India. Its services span Salesforce implementation, cloud migration, AI/ML integration, and proprietary offerings such as urIntegrate (multi-cloud data management) and Patent Labs.
Graid Technology Inc.
Graid Technology is a Silicon Valley and Taiwan storage startup that builds SupremeRAID, the first GPU-based RAID solution for NVMe and NVMe-over-Fabrics SSDs. By moving RAID processing off the CPU and onto an NVIDIA GPU sitting out of the data path, the company unlocks the full performance of modern flash-delivering millions of IOPS and tens of gigabytes per second of throughput-while protecting data for AI, HPC, cloud, and enterprise workloads.
Infotech Spectrum Inc
Infotech Spectrum Inc is a Santa Clara, California IT consulting and professional staffing firm founded in 2003. It pairs contract, contract-to-hire, and direct placement staffing with delivery services spanning strategic IT consulting, enterprise software, cloud, and computer systems validation (CSV) for regulated life sciences work. Working with clients such as Gilead, Genentech, Cisco, and Juul, the roughly 86-person company blends onsite Silicon Valley talent with a global delivery model to help enterprises staff hard-to-fill roles and ship technology projects on schedule and on budget.
Innowi Inc.
Innowi Inc. is a Santa Clara, California restaurant-technology company that builds an all-in-one point-of-sale and ordering platform. Its stack spans POS, self-service kiosks, tabletop QR ordering, online ordering and delivery, a kitchen display system, marketing and rewards, analytics, and employee management - designed to help independent and multi-location restaurants cut third-party commission fees, sync orders across channels, and run leaner operations.
Milestone Inc
Milestone Inc is a Santa Clara-based, AI-native digital experience platform (DXP) company that helps enterprises get discovered across search and AI engines, personalize customer experiences, and accelerate customer acquisition. Founded in 1998 by Benu Aggarwal as a marketing company for hotels, Milestone has grown into a composable software and services provider whose GEO-first CMS, Schema Manager, Content Studio, AI Agents, Local Listings, Personalization Engine, and analytics power more than 2,000 brands across hospitality, financial services, restaurants, automotive, retail, and healthcare.
ANELLO Photonics
ANELLO Photonics is a Santa Clara, California semiconductor and navigation company that builds SiPhOG, described as the world's smallest high-precision silicon photonic optical gyroscope. By shrinking fiber-optic-class gyroscope performance onto a chip, ANELLO delivers inertial measurement units (IMUs) and full inertial navigation systems (INS) that keep vehicles, drones, ships and robots positioned accurately when GPS/GNSS signals are jammed, spoofed or simply unavailable - across land, air and sea. Founded in 2018 by silicon-photonics pioneer Dr. Mario Paniccia and MEMS/inertial-sensor veteran Mike Horton, the company serves defense, maritime, aerospace, agriculture, construction, mining and autonomous-vehicle markets.
Articul8 AI
Articul8 AI is a Santa Clara-based enterprise generative AI company, spun out of Intel in January 2024, that builds domain-specific GenAI systems for regulated and mission-critical industries such as energy, manufacturing, semiconductors, aerospace, and financial services. Its flagship ModelMesh platform acts as an autonomous 'agent of agents' that orchestrates specialized models on a customer's own data with full auditability and security. The company reached a valuation above $500 million within two years of launch and serves customers including Hitachi Energy, Franklin Templeton, AWS, and Intel.
Essert Inc.
Essert Inc. is a Silicon Valley software company that builds a Declarative AI platform to automate cybersecurity, privacy, and AI-governance compliance for enterprises. Founded in 2022 by a team of serial entrepreneurs, Essert helps publicly traded companies and regulated organizations navigate frameworks like the SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules, CCPA/CPRA, and emerging AI regulation - auto-generating policies, running materiality and risk assessments, monitoring controls, and producing audit-ready disclosure reports.
Halo Industries, Inc.
Halo Industries is a Santa Clara deep-tech company that uses lasers instead of diamond wire saws to slice silicon carbide crystal boules into wafers, the foundational substrate for high-voltage power electronics. Spun out of Stanford in 2014, its proprietary light-based process aims to eliminate kerf loss, cut defects, and slash water and energy use, giving more usable wafers from every expensive crystal. Backed by an $80M Series B, Halo is scaling SiC production for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, renewables, and aerospace, and extending the same approach to silicon, sapphire, and diamond.
Light Polymers
Light Polymers is a Santa Clara nanochemistry company built around lyotropic liquid crystals - water-based materials that can be coated directly onto surfaces to manage light. Its flagship innovation is a direct-coat polarizer that replaces the laminated films used in OLED, MicroLED, and AR/VR displays, aiming for thinner, brighter, lower-cost optics with a simpler supply chain. Founded in 2013, the company runs chemical synthesis and R&D in California and application engineering and manufacturing in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Lightwheel
Lightwheel is a Physical AI infrastructure company building the data layer that teaches robots to work in the real world. It produces physically accurate SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human demonstration data, and evaluation platforms so robots can learn safely and cheaply in simulation before they are deployed. Founded in 2023 by former autonomous-driving-simulation lead Steve Xie, Lightwheel partners with NVIDIA and supplies simulation assets and synthetic datasets to leading robotics teams.
MarcoPolo
MarcoPolo is a Santa Clara, California company building governed AI infrastructure that connects agentic AI - Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, Copilot or any MCP-enabled assistant - to a company's internal data across 50+ systems like Snowflake, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, S3, Salesforce and Jira. Instead of building fragile one-off integrations, teams route through a single secure Model Context Protocol connection with isolated execution, scoped credentials, encrypted secrets and smart context management, so AI can query, correlate and act on enterprise data without leaking it. The product pairs a governed Sandbox, a Cost Plane for token visibility and routing, and a unified Connections CLI. MarcoPolo is the pivot of Immersa, a RevOps data-intelligence startup that raised about $16M from investors including Mayfield's Navin Chaddha.
nEye.ai
nEye.ai (nEye Systems) is a Santa Clara semiconductor company building optical circuit switches (OCS) on a single chip. By fusing MEMS with silicon photonics and CMOS at wafer scale, its flagship SuperSwitch aims to move data between thousands of GPUs, CPUs and memory units with far less power and space than conventional electrical switching. Founded in 2020 by UC Berkeley photonics researchers and led by telecom-optics veteran Ashish Vengsarkar, the company raised an $80M Series C in April 2026, bringing total funding to about $152.5M as it scales foundry-based manufacturing for AI data centers.
Quintar, Inc.
Quintar is a Santa Clara-based extended reality company building a device-agnostic spatial XR platform that turns physical venues into digitally enhanced 'Quintar Places.' Its patented Q.reality platform combines a Spatial Visual Positioning System with True Spatial Video to overlay real-time, data-driven content on live sports and other events. Quintar is the official mobile AR and XR developer of the PGA TOUR and built PGA TOUR Vision, the first professional golf application for Apple Vision Pro. Founded in 2021 by former Intel CTO Dr. Sankar (Jay) Jayaram and Dr. Jeff Jonas, the company has raised roughly $11 million, including an $8.2 million Series A in 2024.
xMEMS
xMEMS is a Santa Clara semiconductor company that builds sound and cooling out of silicon. Its piezoMEMS platform produces the world's first solid-state MEMS loudspeakers - all-silicon drivers with no moving voice coils - for earbuds, hearing aids, AI glasses and headphones, and the first 'fan-on-a-chip' active micro-cooling device that moves air inside phones, wearables and AI data-center optics. Founded in 2018, the company holds more than 300 patents and has raised roughly $129M across four rounds.
Jeff Yen
Jeff Yen is a Stanford-trained experimental physicist turned entrepreneur, and the co-founder and CEO of Etherdyne Technologies, a Santa Clara startup building 'wire-free' power. His company's Ether Power platform uses low-frequency magnetic resonance to deliver up to 100 watts through the air to multiple devices at once inside a three-dimensional 'Power Zone,' no cords or fixed charging pads required. After eight years of quiet R&D with co-inventor Dr. Robert Moffatt, Yen brought the technology to CES 2026, raised more than $1.2 million from over 400 investors on StartEngine, and now pitches wireless power as the next utility, an 'Electrification 2.0' as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi.
Atomiton
Atomiton builds an immersive intelligence platform that ties operational activity to energy, water and carbon performance, helping data centers, manufacturers and building operators cut costs and hit sustainability targets in real time.
Questivity
Questivity is a Santa Clara IT infrastructure integrator and training house. Founded in 1999, it designs, deploys, and supports the unglamorous plumbing of enterprise technology - networking, security, servers, storage, and virtualization - for mid-size and large organizations, and runs a parallel learning arm that hires, trains, and deploys engineers in Cisco, VMware, and data center disciplines. Its pitch is vendor-neutral: solve the client's problem with the right gear, on budget, rather than whatever a single manufacturer is selling.