
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.
Gauss Labs is a Palo Alto-based industrial AI company building software that reads the firehose of data coming off semiconductor fabs and predicts what's about to go wrong. Spun out with $55M in seed capital from SK hynix in 2020, its Panoptes Virtual Metrology and Image Metrology products are deployed inside SK hynix's high-volume memory fabs, where they have measured tens of millions of wafers and cut process variability by double digits.