Great Sky, a startup developing a brain-inspired computing platform for artificial intelligence, announced the debut of its superconducting optoelectronic architecture alongside a $14 million seed funding round led by Bison Ventures with participation from Matchstick Ventures, Range Ventures, and several angel investors.
The Boulder, Colorado-based company says its technology represents a fundamentally new computing approach designed to overcome limitations associated with today’s dominant AI infrastructure, which relies largely on transformers running on GPUs.
Great Sky’s architecture combines superconducting computation, optical communication, and neuroscience-inspired system design. The platform, known as Superconducting Optoelectronic Networks (SOENs), integrates superconducting circuits operating at cryogenic temperatures with optical links capable of transmitting signals as faint as a single photon. The system also uses semiconductor circuitry to coordinate interactions between electronic and photonic components.
The company said the architecture allows computing systems to behave more like biological neural networks, with memory and processing tightly integrated. This structure supports continuous learning and on-device adaptation, enabling AI systems to learn from new data streams without constant retraining.
The technology stems from more than a decade of research conducted at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where the founding team developed the underlying components and published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers. Great Sky said its chips have already reached a major milestone with successful tape-outs demonstrating significant improvements in energy efficiency and performance compared with traditional silicon-based systems.
The platform is designed to support high-throughput, low-latency workloads such as spoken language processing, real-time video analysis, and multimodal AI applications. In one example cited by the company, the system can process more than 60 million video frames per second, far exceeding the roughly 30 frames per second typically handled by conventional GPU-based systems.
Looking ahead, Great Sky plans to build large-scale AI systems by connecting wafer-scale neural networks using advanced fiber-optic interconnections. The company envisions future systems containing more neurons and synapses than the human brain while operating dramatically faster than biological systems.
The founding team includes CEO Jeff Shainline, CTO Jeff Chiles, VP of Fabrication Saeed Khan, and VP of Architecture Bryce Primavera, all former NIST researchers specializing in photonics, superconductors, and semiconductor systems.
The new funding will support further development of the company’s AI-native hardware platform and commercialization across sectors including defense, energy, and large-scale AI infrastructure.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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. 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.”
Jeff Shainline, Co-Founder And CEO, Great Sky
“Great Sky is rethinking compute from first principles by building hardware inspired by the architecture of the human brain. They are setting out to enable forms of intelligence that feel inherently human, while achieving speeds and energy efficiencies traditional architectures can’t approach. At Bison, we look for visionary founders pursuing non-incremental, deep technical innovation with the potential to transform the world as we know it. Great Sky exemplifies that.”
Ari Wright, Principal, Bison Ventures
