# 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.

- **Role:** Co-Founder/CEO at Gimlet Labs, Inc.
- **Organizations:** Gimlet Labs, Inc., Stanford University, Pixie Labs, New Relic, Google, NVIDIA
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.S., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, PhD in Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-founded Pixie Labs, acquired by New Relic in December 2020, Pixie contributed to CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) as an open source project, Engineering Lead at Google AI - work led to the creation of Google Lens

## Career timeline

- **~2005-2009** — Undergraduate at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; intern at NVIDIA
- **~2009-2015** — PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford; GPU energy modeling research; continued work at NVIDIA spanning circuit design, architecture, and software stack
- **~2015-2018** — Engineering Lead at Google AI; built on-device AI systems; project became Google Lens (real-time image search optimized for mobile edge hardware)
- **2018** — Co-founded Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes-native observability platform using eBPF kernel instrumentation
- **2020** — Pixie Labs acquired by New Relic (December 2020); Pixie later contributed to CNCF as open source under Apache 2.0
- **2021** — Began building Gimlet Labs; joined Stanford as Adjunct Professor of Computer Science
- **2025** — Gimlet Labs emerged from stealth in October 2025 with first multi-silicon inference cloud
- **2026** — Gimlet Labs raised $80M Series A led by Menlo Ventures (March 2026); total funding $92M; OpenAI powering Codex-Spark on Cerebras via Gimlet

## Achievements

- Co-founded Pixie Labs, acquired by New Relic in December 2020
- Pixie contributed to CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) as an open source project
- Engineering Lead at Google AI - work led to the creation of Google Lens
- Raised $92M total for Gimlet Labs including $80M Series A led by Menlo Ventures (2026)
- Customers include top-3 frontier AI labs and top-3 hyperscalers
- Helping OpenAI optimize models on Cerebras chips (powers Codex-Spark)
- Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
- PhD research on GPU energy modeling with publications in ACM Computing Surveys
- Co-authored research paper on kforge: AI-agent-driven kernel synthesis for diverse hardware accelerators
- Tripled Gimlet Labs customer base since October 2025 public launch
- Gimlet Labs reached eight-figure revenue at public launch

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Gimlet Labs raised $80M Series A led by Menlo Ventures; investors include Eclipse Ventures, Prosperity7, Triatomic, Factory, Bill Coughran, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan
- **2026-03** — TechCrunch featured Gimlet Labs: 'solving the AI inference bottleneck in a surprisingly elegant way'
- **2026-02** — Gimlet Labs helping OpenAI optimize models on Cerebras chips for Codex-Spark
- **2025-12** — Appeared on TWIML AI Podcast episode #757: 'Scaling Agentic Inference Across Heterogeneous Compute'
- **2025-10** — Gimlet Labs emerged from stealth with eight-figure revenue and top-tier customers

## Links

- Website: https://gimletlabs.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zasgar
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/zainasgar
- GitHub: https://github.com/zasgar

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/zain-asgar
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-13