Great Sky raises $30.7M seed to build AI chips from superconductors and light
What's the deal? Great Sky, a US deep-tech startup, has filed to raise $30,720,000 in a seed round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company builds neuromorphic AI chips whose circuits physically behave like neurons and synapses, using superconducting electronics and optical communication at single-photon levels.
What's the endgame? Great Sky wants to rebuild artificial intelligence from first principles, targeting performance and efficiency gains of multiple orders of magnitude over conventional silicon. Its architecture co-locates memory and processing to overcome data-movement bottlenecks in large-scale AI infrastructure, interconnecting neurons via optical waveguides.
Why now? The company emerged from 12 years of research at the National Institute of Standards and TechnologyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and its first chips are already running inference. Chief executive officer Jeffrey Shainline is listed as the contact on the filing.
The signal: The round is unusually large for its category. Among seed rounds in US quantum technologies over the trailing 48 months, it sits in the 99th percentile of a 164-deal sample — a sign of how much capital investors are willing to commit to physics-bound bets on the future of AI computing.
Read more: Intelligence360
Image credit: Great Sky