smartnic
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The Little Card That Gave the CPU Its Job Back
AMD Pensando made a specialized processor for the invisible chores that steal time from expensive CPUs and GPUs. The wager turned a repeat Cisco founding team, roughly $313 million in funding and one well-timed piece of silicon into a $1.9 billion chapter of AMD's data-center strategy.
Accton
Accton spent decades building the switches behind other companies’ brands. Now AI has turned that quiet Taiwanese manufacturing playbook into an $8 billion open-infrastructure business - and pulled it from the rack into optics, cooling and compute.
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.