silicon
(15)
Evan Petridis Is Teaching AI to Respect the Hardware
After a career spent making networks, sensors and embedded systems behave outside the lab, the ModelCat CEO is betting that AI’s next useful trick is learning the limits of the machine beneath it.
Visibl Semiconductors
Visibl Semiconductors (YC W26) is a San Francisco startup building an AI-native coordination layer for chip design. Its software watches specifications, RTL code, CI pipelines and EDA tool outputs for 'drift' - the slow divergence between what a chip was supposed to do and what the design actually does - then opens evidence-backed cases and proposes review-ready fixes that a human must approve before anything ships. Founded by Bryce Neil (CEO) and Jordon Kashanchi (CTO), the company targets verification and methodology owners on teams heading toward integration, design freeze and tapeout, where a single missed misalignment can trigger a $5M-$20M respin.
Veerbhan Kheterpal
Veerbhan Kheterpal is the co-founder and CEO of Quadric, a Burlingame, California processor IP company building the Chimera general-purpose neural processor (GPNPU) for on-device AI inference. A three-time technology founder with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, he previously co-founded Fabbrix (acquired by PDF Solutions) and was a technical co-founder of 21, Inc. Quadric's software-first architecture aims to run any AI model without the obsolescence that plagues fixed-function AI accelerators, and the company has raised roughly $90M across its funding rounds while scaling licensing revenue sharply through 2025.
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems is an American multinational technology company and the world's largest maker of networking hardware. Founded in 1984 by two Stanford computer scientists, it builds the routers, switches, silicon, security, and software that route much of the world's internet traffic. Today Cisco is repositioning around AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and observability - anchored by its 2024 acquisition of Splunk - while remaining the default backbone for enterprise, service-provider, and government networks.
ESWIN Computing
ESWIN Computing is a Beijing-based chip company building system-on-chip products around the open RISC-V architecture. It designs edge-computing and AI SoCs - most notably the EIC77 series - pairs them with its own NPU and software stack, and sells them as chips and developer boards for smart home, automotive, industrial, and PC-class computing. It is the IC-and-solutions arm of the larger Beijing ESWIN Technology Group founded by former BOE chairman Wang Dongsheng.
Quadric
Quadric is a semiconductor IP company that licenses the Chimera family of general-purpose neural processing units (GPNPUs) - a single, fully C++ programmable processor core that runs machine learning inference alongside classic DSP and control code in one unified architecture. Founded in 2016 by three engineers who previously built bitcoin computing hardware, Quadric aims to fix the fragmentation of on-device AI silicon: instead of a fixed-function neural accelerator that breaks whenever a new model appears, its cores scale from 1 to 864 TOPS and can adopt new networks - including large language models up to 30 billion parameters - through a software port rather than a chip respin.
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.
AheadComputing
AheadComputing is a Beaverton, Oregon semiconductor startup founded in 2024 by four former Intel CPU architects who left to build high-performance 64-bit RISC-V processor cores from a clean slate. Betting that the future bottleneck in AI and data-center computing is the CPU rather than the GPU, the company is designing a 'Big Core' out-of-order engine that maximizes per-core performance without the legacy baggage of x86. Backed by roughly $53M in seed funding from Eclipse, Toyota Ventures, Cambium and legendary chip designer Jim Keller, AheadComputing wants to prove that an open instruction set can deliver top-tier performance.
Sassine Ghazi
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 Corporation
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.
Otto Marroquin
Otto Marroquin is the Founder of Celera Corporation (operating as Celera Incorporated / Celera Semiconductor), an AI-powered analog semiconductor company headquartered in Alameda, California. Celera has built a patented platform - Nestos - that uses digital twins and behavioral modeling to automate analog IC design, cutting development cycles by up to 10x compared to traditional workflows. Backed by $23 million in funding including a $20 million Series A from Maverick Silicon in August 2025, Marroquin's venture targets the $70 billion analog semiconductor market with a platform that delivers custom analog ICs at a pace the industry has never seen before.
Reiner Pope
Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, an AI chip startup based in Mountain View, California, designing purpose-built silicon for large language models. A former Google Senior Staff Software Engineer who led AI software development for Google's TPUs and served as Efficiency Lead for PaLM, Pope left Google one week before ChatGPT launched to build what he calls 'the best chips for LLMs that physics allows.' MatX has raised approximately $604M to date, including a $500M Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP, and is building a hybrid SRAM-HBM chip architecture targeting the world's leading AI labs.
Zain Asgar
Zain Asgar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gimlet Labs, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company building the world's first multi-silicon inference cloud. With a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering focused on GPU energy modeling, Asgar previously led engineering at Google AI (where his work became Google Lens) and founded Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes-native observability platform acquired by New Relic in 2020. At Gimlet Labs, he is tackling one of AI's most pressing infrastructure challenges: making AI inference 3-10x more efficient by intelligently routing workloads across heterogeneous hardware including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, ARM, and specialized accelerators like Cerebras.
Gavin Uberti
Gavin Uberti is the co-founder and CEO of Etched, a Cupertino-based AI chip startup building the world's first transformer-specific ASIC called Sohu. A Harvard dropout and 2024 Thiel Fellow, Uberti co-founded Etched in 2022 alongside Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen after betting that transformer architecture would dominate AI for years to come. That bet has paid off spectacularly: Etched has raised over $625 million (including a $500M round in January 2026 at a $5 billion valuation), and Sohu claims to run transformer inference 20x faster than Nvidia's H100 at a fraction of the cost - positioning Etched as one of the most serious challengers to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute.
Guido Appenzeller
Guido Appenzeller is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on AI and infrastructure investing. A two-time startup founder, he co-founded Voltage Security (acquired by HP) and Big Switch Networks (acquired by Arista), led the team that developed the OpenFlow v1.0 networking standard at Stanford's Clean Slate Lab, served as CTO at both VMware and Intel, and is now one of Silicon Valley's sharpest voices on LLM economics - having coined the term 'LLMflation' to describe the 10x-per-year cost decline in AI inference.