Gradiant is an MIT spinout turned global water-technology company that designs, builds, and operates advanced systems to treat, reuse, and recover industrial water and wastewater. Using a stack of proprietary technologies - from Carrier Gas Extraction to Counterflow Reverse Osmosis and an AI control layer called SmartOps - Gradiant helps semiconductor fabs, food and beverage giants, pharmaceutical makers, miners, and refiners cut freshwater use, recover lithium and other minerals, and destroy 'forever chemicals.' The first unicorn in the water industry, it reached a $2 billion valuation in 2026.
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.
Teradar is a Boston deep-tech company building the first commercial sensor that sees using the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum - the slice between microwave and infrared. Its solid-state Modular Terahertz Engine combines radar's ability to punch through rain, fog and snow with resolution approaching that of lidar, claiming up to 20x the detail of today's automotive radar with no moving parts. Founded in 2020 and out of stealth in November 2025 with a $150M Series B, Teradar is working with eight global automakers and Tier-1 suppliers and aims to put its sensor in a production vehicle by 2028.
Arena Physica is a New York-based AI company building 'electromagnetic superintelligence' - AI systems grounded in applied physics that accelerate the design, testing, and optimization of advanced hardware. Its Atlas platform and Heaviside foundation model predict electromagnetic behavior from geometry in milliseconds, claiming roughly 800,000x faster results than commercial solvers, and are used by hardware leaders across semiconductors, aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and defense.
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.
Noah Sturcken is the founder and CEO of Ferric, a New York semiconductor company building the world's smallest, most efficient power converters. A Columbia PhD who turned his dissertation into a company, he pioneered integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) that bury thin-film magnetic inductors inside the chip itself, shrinking power delivery by more than 10x. As AI processors grow ever hungrier for clean, dense power, Ferric's tech sits exactly where the bottleneck is - and partners like Marvell are now building it into custom AI silicon.
Pratap Ranade is the CEO and co-founder of Arena (Arena Physica), a New York startup building Atlas, an AI hardware engineer grounded in applied physics that helps semiconductor, aerospace, automotive, medical-device and defense companies design and test physical hardware. A Stanford and Columbia-trained physicist who left a PhD to join McKinsey, he previously co-founded Kimono Labs (acquired by Palantir) and led engineering and machine learning at Enigma. Arena raised a $30M Series B in April 2025 and counts AMD, Bausch & Lomb and Anduril among its partners.
Synopsys is the quiet giant behind the world's chips. Its electronic design automation (EDA) software, semiconductor IP, and AI-driven design tools are used to design and verify nearly every advanced silicon chip on the planet - from smartphone processors to AI accelerators. Founded in 1986 by Aart de Geus and led today by CEO Sassine Ghazi, the Sunnyvale company turned the impossibly hard task of laying out billions of transistors into a software problem, and now layers AI on top of it. Its 2025 acquisition of simulation leader Ansys pushed it deeper into multiphysics and systems engineering.
Christina Olmsted is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads global marketing and PR teams at the epicenter of the AI revolution. With nearly a decade at NVIDIA and 15 years prior at Cisco, she built and championed campaigns that repositioned entire computing paradigms - from Cisco's Internet of Everything brand movement to NVIDIA's AI and accelerated computing narrative. A UC Berkeley dual-degree alumna with a flair for connecting technology to human impact, she operates at the intersection of deep technical product marketing and culture-shaping storytelling.
Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.
Lisa Lahde is Vice President of Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads campaign marketing for priority industries and the Omniverse platform. A veteran tech marketer with roots in social media and community management, she joined NVIDIA around 2016 and has helped shape the company's storytelling around AI, autonomous systems, and the industrial metaverse. She produced NVIDIA's 'I Am AI' docuseries, contributed to Forbes BrandVoice as an AI innovator profiler, and moderated the OpenUSD session at GTC 2024 in San Jose. Outside the GPU giant's orbit, she runs the persona of @JewelryHunter - a longtime indie fashion enthusiast who blogged about emerging jewelry designers.
Sampson Han is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, the Santa Clara-based technology powerhouse behind the GPU revolution driving modern artificial intelligence. Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge silicon and the enterprise market, Han oversees marketing strategy for NVIDIA's data center and AI product portfolio - the very infrastructure powering the global AI buildout. He works within one of the most influential technology companies in history, helping define how hyperscalers, enterprises, and sovereign AI initiatives understand and adopt NVIDIA's data center solutions.
Sath Sivasothy is VP of Sales and Marketing at Vyrian Inc., a Houston-based electronic components distributor and government defense contractor he co-founded in 2011. With a background in electrical engineering and over two decades in the semiconductor and electronics industry - including a stint as a Product Development Engineer at Texas Instruments and a run as VP of Sales at Silicon Valley burn-in testing firm CEIBIS Inc. where he doubled gross sales to $7M in 24 months - Sivasothy has built Vyrian into an Inc. 5000 multi-year honoree with 130+ employees across 12 global offices.
Sameer Wasson is the CEO of MIPS, the storied semiconductor IP company now reborn as a RISC-V pure-play targeting the physical AI era. He joined in September 2023 after 18 years at Texas Instruments, where he ran the Processors business and earlier built TI's mmWave radar franchise. MIPS is now a subsidiary of GlobalFoundries.
Sassine Ghazi is the president and CEO of Synopsys, the electronic design automation company whose tools underpin most of the world's advanced chips. He took the top job in January 2024 after 26 years inside the company and steered the $35 billion acquisition of Ansys to close in July 2025.
Celera is an Alameda-based analog semiconductor company using AI to automate the historically artisanal craft of analog IC design. Its ChipHUB platform combines proprietary machine-learning agents with decades of analog expertise to deliver custom analog and mixed-signal chips up to 10x faster than legacy vendors. In March 2025, Celera became the first company to sample an analog IC entirely designed by autonomous software.
Ceremorphic is a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor startup building energy-efficient AI supercomputing silicon. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Venkat Mattela, the company taped out a first-of-its-kind 5nm HPC/AI chip on TSMC's most advanced node and is applying the same Hierarchical Learning Processor architecture to data center AI, robotics, automotive, and analog-AI-driven drug discovery.
Chain Reaction is an Israeli-American semiconductor company designing custom ASICs for encrypted computation and Bitcoin mining. Its EL3CTRUM line powers next-generation hashing hardware, while its 3PU (Privacy Processor) accelerates Fully Homomorphic Encryption so cloud workloads in finance, healthcare and defense can run on encrypted data.
GSME (Global Semiconductor Microelectronics) is a San Jose-based semiconductor solutions company offering customized silicon, RF and power management IC design, multi-project wafer services, and turnkey chip manufacturing for fabless customers building GPUs, CPUs, IoT and wireless products.
MatX is a Mountain View semiconductor company building chips designed exclusively for large language models. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google TPU engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, it aims to deliver an order-of-magnitude more performance-per-dollar for frontier model training and inference than current GPUs.
Dr. Venkat Mattela is the Founder and CEO of Ceremorphic, Inc., a San Jose-based deep-tech company designing ultra-low-power AI supercomputing chips built on TSMC's 5nm process. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD in Electrical Engineering, he previously founded Redpine Signals and sold its wireless connectivity division to Silicon Labs for $308 million in 2020. With over 100 patents and four decades in semiconductor engineering, Mattela is now betting Ceremorphic's proprietary ThreadArch architecture can reshape AI computing for data centers, drug discovery, and next-generation HPC workloads.
Andrew Verhalen is a General Partner at Matrix Partners who has been investing in infrastructure and communications companies since 1992. A former Intel product manager for the 8086 microprocessor and a divisional VP at 3Com, he brought operator scars to venture before that was a phrase. He helped seed Grand Junction Networks (later a major division at Cisco), led Matrix into Unwired Planet, SiTera, and Alteon WebSystems, and serves as lead independent director at semiconductor company Ambarella.
Akash Systems is a San Francisco deep-tech company building chips and systems cooled by lab-grown diamond. Its patented GaN-on-Diamond technology pulls heat away from transistors at the nanometer scale, powering everything from CubeSat radios that beam data at 5 Gbps to AI servers that run cooler at higher density. Backed by Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and the U.S. CHIPS Act, the company is building a 40,000 sq ft diamond-semiconductor fab in West Oakland.
Avicena Tech builds LightBundle, a microLED-based optical interconnect that moves data between chips at terabit-per-second densities while sipping sub-picojoules of energy per bit. The Sunnyvale company is betting that the GPU clusters powering AI need a new physical layer - one that copper can't deliver and traditional silicon photonics can't match on power.
D2S, Inc. is a San Jose-based semiconductor software company that builds GPU-accelerated computational design platforms for photomask manufacturing. Its TrueMask product family turns inverse-lithography and curvilinear designs into mask-writer-ready data, and the company runs the eBeam Initiative, a cross-industry consortium pushing electron-beam lithography forward.
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.
Element Energy is a Menlo Park battery management company that uses semiconductor-grade hardware, software, and cell-level controls to extend battery life, prevent fires, and give retired EV batteries a second career on the grid.
Etched is an American semiconductor startup building Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to run only one thing: transformer models. By burning the transformer architecture directly into silicon, Etched claims an 8-chip Sohu server can match the throughput of 160 Nvidia H100 GPUs on Llama-70B inference. Founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, the company has raised over $625M, including a recent $500M round at a reported $5B valuation.
Eric Rosenblum is a General Partner at Xora Innovation, a Temasek-backed early-stage venture firm investing in AI infrastructure, applied AI, and deep tech. Based in Silicon Valley, he is the firm's first US-based GP, bridging Southeast Asian capital with American innovation. Before Xora, he built Foothill Ventures into a leading deep-tech seed fund and spent his career as an operator at Google, Palantir, and as founder/executive at two acquired startups. A Harvard and MIT Sloan graduate raised in Steubenville, Ohio, he brings a rare combination of big-tech product leadership, China market experience, and hands-on startup scaling to his role as investor.
Positron AI designs purpose-built inference hardware for transformer models, aiming to make Nvidia GPUs optional for running large language models at production scale. Its first product, Atlas, ships from US fabs and claims roughly 3x lower latency and 4x better performance-per-watt versus an H100 system.