Great Sky, a Boulder, CO-based provider of computing hardware solutions, has raised $14 million in a Seed funding round led by Bison Ventures.
The round also saw participation from Matchstick Ventures and Range Ventures, as well as from angel investors such as Mark Leslie, Adam Pritzker, and Ivan Vendrov.
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The company plans to use the funds to grow its operations and accelerate development.
Great Sky has also achieved key technical milestones, including tape-out of chips that offer significant improvements in efficiency and performance over today’s silicon. For decades, researchers have imagined an ideal computing approach combining ultra-low-temperature superconducting computation, high-speed optical communication, and brain-inspired architectures as a better alternative for AI. The team has steadily advanced these components, which are now integrated into complete neural networks, thanks to progress in circuit design, manufacturing, and modelling.
Great Sky is uniquely positioned to bring this long-envisioned architecture to life. The company and technology are built on 12 years of research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), resulting in 23 peer-reviewed publications and eight patents. It provides a purpose-built computing platform for the next generation of AI, enabling high-throughput, low-latency processing for applications such as speech understanding, continuous video analysis and large-scale multimodal models.
Across the industry experts have highlighted the growing limits of GPU scaling smaller gains from bigger models, high energy demands, and latency that slows agentic and multimodal tasks. Morgan Stanley analysts warn that rising AI demand could create a US power shortfall of up to 13 gigawatts by 2028.
Great Sky’s brain-inspired architecture overcomes these limits by combining three key technologies.
- Superconducting compute: Provides extremely high energy efficiency and performance at cryogenic temperatures. Instead of digitally simulating neurons, Great Sky builds circuits that naturally act like neurons.
- High-bandwidth optical connectivity: Delivers communication speeds and efficiency far beyond electrical connections, removing a major AI bottleneck. Great Sky transmits optical signals as weak as a single photon, achieving the lowest possible latency and energy use.
- Semiconductor circuitry: Connects electrons and photons, handling amplification, light generation, and control logic.
The result is a system that works more like a brain than a traditional computer, with performance that enables completely new types of AI applications. This architecture is naturally suited for multimodal and continuous-stream AI workloads.
Great Sky takes brain-inspired computing further than previous approaches. By combining memory and processing it enables fast programmability and learning algorithms that let systems adapt to new data without constant retraining. This close integration also improves stability, and control, making it easier to guide behaviour as models update over time. Plus, by using superconducting and photonic technologies instead of shrinking transistors, the hardware can be manufactured more cheaply than today’s GPUs while leveraging U.S. manufacturing capabilities.
Great Sky’s first-generation chips have delivered significant performance gains across commercial, defence, and energy applications. For example, in video analysis, Great Sky’s system can process over 60 million frames per second using far less energy than a typical GPU, which usually handles 30 frames per second or less.
“AI’s current stack—transformers running on GPUs—has brought tremendous advances. But at the foundation, the current approach is mismatched to the needs of efficient, scalable AI,” said Jeff Shainline, cofounder and CEO of Great Sky. “By constructing new hardware that enables more sophisticated architectures and algorithms while performing operations near the physical limits of speed and energy efficiency, we can transition to a completely different roadmap for scaling that doesn’t require hundreds of billions in capex and gigawatt data centers. There’s a vast, new space to explore.”
“AI is a domain with tremendous promise, while quantum computing is exciting because it introduces new devices and information-processing concepts. We use many of the same devices as quantum technologies – superconducting circuits, single-photon detectors – but we use them for classical, analog computation in a parallel, distributed architecture, which is ideal for AI,” said Shainline. “And unlike quantum computers, our systems are highly resilient to noise, can operate at much higher temperatures than superconducting qubits, and are broadly applicable to any application that benefits from intelligence.”
The company is manufacturing its technology using a robust, scalable process, as evidenced by multiple successful tape-outs. Long term, Great Sky will develop modular cognitive systems by tiling wafer-scale networks with an advanced fibre-optic interconnection system. These will unlock supercomputers with more neurons and synapses than the human brain, operating a million times faster than biologics and far beyond today’s largest GPU clusters.
Great Sky’s progress reflects over a decade of foundational research spanning superconducting materials, optical networking, cryogenic system engineering, and novel AI-native architectures. The company was founded by CEO Jeff Shainline, CTO Jeff Chiles, VP of Fabrication Saeed Khan, and VP of Architecture Bryce Primavera, electronics, optics, and physics PhDs and former NIST researchers who have spent the last 12 years building this technology. As part of the news, Tom Biegala, Founding Partner at Bison Ventures, and Mark Wade, CEO and cofounder of Ayar Labs, will join its Board.
Great Sky is producing its technology through a proven, scalable process and plans to build multi-modular cognitive systems with fibre-optic interconnections, creating supercomputers far faster than today’s GPUs. Founded by Jeff Shainline, Jeff Chiles, Saeed Khan, and Bryce Primavera—PhDs and former NIST researchers—the company builds on over a decade of research in superconducting materials, optical networking, and AI-native architectures. Tom Biegala and Mark Wade will join the Board.
About Great Sky
Founded by CEO Jeff Shainline, CTO Jeff Chiles, VP of Fabrication Saeed Khan, and VP of Architecture Bryce Primavera, Great Sky builds hardware to push intelligence to the limits of physics. The team, composed of PhDs and former NIST researchers, has decades of experience in photonics, physics, semiconductors, and superconductors. The company is backed by top investors, including Bison Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, Range Ventures, Bluebirds SVM Limited, Access Venture Partners, Olive Tree Capital, Buff Gold Ventures, Mythos Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, Service Provider Capital, and angels like Mark Leslie, Adam Pritzker, Harry Gandhi, Jonathan Cortes, Murray McCaig, Kai Hudek, Owen Lozman, and Ken Li.
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