SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS
Marshall Choy , VP Product , and Director Vijay Tatkar outline SambaNova ’ s sharp growth , Dataflowas-a-service offering and broad range of industry AI opportunities
It ’ s been quite a journey for SambaNova Systems since it was founded by a group of industry luminaries and tech experts in Palo Alto , California , in November 2017 . From humble beginnings at Stanford University , the company has grown to employ over 400 staff worldwide , which should increase by another 100 by the end of this year .
SambaNova secured $ 678 million in Series D funding , led by Softbank Group ’ s Vision Fund 2 , in April , and has already picked up several prestigious awards , including recognition as a Gartner “ Cool Vendor ”, “ Best AI Product for Next Generation Infrastructure ” from CogX , and the VentureBeat “ AI Innovation for Edge AI ” award , among others .
Marshall Choy and Vijay Tatkar – respectively Vice President of Product and Director , Product and Partner Engagements – talk through the company ’ s meteoric rise and broad potential of industry opportunities .
Choy explains how two of its co-founders , Professor Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré , were serving at EE and CS departments , working on AI and ML algorithms and techniques , domain-specific languages , compilers and run-time technologies .
“ They were specifically preparing for this transition of computing we ’ re going through right now – some refer to it as ‘ Software 2.0 ’, and transition from the old world of transactional processing to AI computing , from ERP to deterministic written software ,” said Choy , who worked previously at Sun Microsystems and Oracle , together with Tatkar .
“ It became clear there was a need for a different type of infrastructure
48 November 2021