Great Sky Raises $14M in Seed Funding to Develop Next-Generation AI Computing Hardware
Great Sky just stepped into the AI infrastructure conversation with $14M in fresh capital and a piece of technology that lives closer to physics than marketing. Out of Boulder comes a team that has been living in the deep end of science for more than a decade, quietly working on something most AI conversations barely touch. Hardware. The real kind. The kind that decides whether the next wave of intelligence runs on rockets or roller skates. Now Great Sky has secured $14M in seed funding led by Bison Ventures with participation from Matchstick Ventures and Range Ventures. That is not just capital. That is conviction.
Congratulations are in order for CEO Jeff Shainline and CTO Jeff Chiles, along with co founders Saeed Khan, VP of Fabrication, and Bryce Primavera, VP of Architecture. This crew is not new to the science. These are former NIST researchers who spent years digging into superconducting electronics, photonics, and the uncomfortable physics questions most companies politely ignore. Turns out that kind of patience ages well in the AI era.
Great Sky is building a brain inspired computing architecture that leans on superconducting electronics for computation and single photon optical communication to move information around. Memory and compute live close together instead of shouting across a silicon highway. The goal is simple and brutally ambitious. Build systems that can push AI workloads far beyond what traditional GPU infrastructure can comfortably handle.
Early demonstrations hint at the kind of performance that makes engineers lean forward in their chairs. The system has shown the ability to process more than 60M video frames per second in testing scenarios, a number that feels less like a benchmark and more like a warning shot to the current hardware stack. When compute, optics, and superconducting physics start operating as one system, performance dynamics shift.
The investment also brings heavyweight perspective into the room. Tom Biegala, Founding Partner at Bison Ventures, joins the board, along with Mark Wade, CEO and Co-founder of Ayar Labs. When investors and operators who live at the frontier of deep tech lean in this early, it usually means they see a path others have not mapped yet.
There is a bigger lesson tucked inside this round. The AI boom has been loud about models and data. The quieter conversation is infrastructure. The teams willing to rethink the physics of computing itself are playing a longer game. Great Sky is stepping into that arena with a design that treats photons, superconductors, and neural architectures like components operating within the same system
