Muffi Ghadiali

As AI workloads eat up global computing supply, DRAM prices are surging like never before—creating major challenges for teams trying to plan out their data center spend. One of my portfolio companies, Mext, is addressing the largest cost component in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM). From being on the board of Redis for the last twelve years, I’ve learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new AI techniques, for dramatically reducing the amount of server-DRAM required to run applications, all while maintaining performance. It intelligently manages the server’s memory, keeping hot pages (i.e., those in use by applications) in fast DRAM and offloading cold pages (i.e., those less used) to a much less expensive memory tier (e.g., NVMe Flash). Key to the approach is ensuring cold memory pages that are about to be accessed by an application are back in DRAM before the application needs them or notices that they were gone. This is done without modifications to the application or the OS – so it can run in the cloud or on-premise. Mext thus allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. They're hosting a webinar along with Fred Weber (former CTO of AMD) on Jan 22nd at 10am pacific time. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/gXe9GCeE

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Chatting with ZEDEDA CEO, Said Ouissal, and he has an elegant way of explaining the evolution of industrial Edge. Zededa provides OS for orchestrating Edge AI. 2010s were about IoT/Edge Connectivity. 2020s were about Edge computing/processing. 2030s will be all about Edge AI.

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Last year, we invested in Cognichip: what we expect to be a generational semiconductor company by making chip design as simple and accessible as vibe coding. They came out of stealth today with a vision for how we will design chips in the future. Today, building chips is nowhere nearly as simple as uttering these commands. In fact, this very task requires going through thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of experienced engineer time. It gets worse with every tech node. Chip design is tedious, which is why chips cost a fortune to design, and take forever to bring to market, resulting in only a handful of (giant) chip companies. Faraj Aalaei, who personally built, grew, and took several chip companies public over the past 3 decades, founded Cognichip with Simon Sabato and Ehsan Kamalinejad to disrupt this status quo: https://lnkd.in/gAkM_k6Q He sounded the alarm a decade ago, and as a dear friend of Lux, he was kind enough to share his vision that became Cognichip: Cognichip has attracted Olympiad-medalist mathematicians and veteran chip designers to make chip design as accessible as coding apps. We expect Cognichip to enable a future where there are as many chip companies as there are software companies, rapidly accelerating compute. We are excited to embark on this journey with the fabulous team Faraj has assembled, along with our friends at Mayfield and FPV Ventures

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If hardware is going to compress from multi-year cycles to adaptive, intelligence-driven programs, it won’t just require builders. It will require platform thinkers. Excited to welcome George Thangadurai to Wizerr’s Advisory Board. George is a Growth-Stage Partner at Avataar Venture Partners and one of our earliest backers. With 30+ years across enterprise software, AI/ML, cloud, and IoT, including leadership at Intel Corporation, Intel Capital and multiple IPO and M&A journeys, he understands what it takes to scale global infrastructure. At Wizerr AI, we are building the AI-native inference infrastructure for hardware systems, where engineering, sourcing, and supply decisions converge at the program level. “As an investor, I look for platform-scale opportunities with durable moats. Wizerr has the ingredients to build the intelligence backbone for hardware programs globally.” Grateful to build this with leaders who see where hardware is heading.

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Here’s your weekly EV charging news recap👇 - Washington State Department of Transportation’s Electric Vehicle Reliability and Accessibility Accelerator (EVC RAA) awards $7M to companies including EVroadway, Electrify America, EVCS, EVgo, Blink Charging, and Amazon - Bart Saunders joins AMPECO as Head of Business Development for North America - Tesla enters @Saudi Arabia as the Kingdom targets 30% EV adoption by 2030 ---------------- 📥 Want the latest EV charging business and policy developments? Subscribe to EVPowerPulse in my profile.

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scoop:⚡ Nvidia is inviting startups to a private Power Summit next week at its Santa Clara HQ—to talk about the need to get more power to data centers for artificial intelligence. More here: https://lnkd.in/eSNEqapw

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AI isn't just powering software. BrightAI just raised $51 million to automate inspection and other hardware-based AI capabilities. As Alexa von Tobel, co-founder of Inspired Capital put it: “So many people are so focused on the future of digital AI, but we’re excited about this new layer of AI: the physical world AI.” We are in the early innings of a series of AI-fueled innovations! https://lnkd.in/enhmafvH

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Glimpse is on a mission to build the world’s most powerful battery quality monitoring platform, enabling automated, high-throughput battery inspection to create next generation quality control software using CT scanning technology. It's W8 / Q2 / 25 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Glimpse, helping battery producers & buyers inspect and evaluate the internal structure of batteries in minutes, with a clear roadmap to turn inspections in seconds this year. Eric Moch and Peter Attia worked together at Tesla where they learned about the complexity of bringing electric vehicles to market from one of the world’s leading electric vehicle manufacturers. They teamed up with Patrick Herring, a research scientist from Toyota Research who worked with Peter at Stanford, to tackle a critically overlooked part of the successful transition to an electrified mobility industry: battery quality. From experience and customer interviews, it was clear that even the most advanced manufacturers in the world faced challenges when it came to maintaining battery quality. The global battery market is $100B+ growing to $300B+ by 2030. Glimpse serves two primary customer types: producers and buyers of batteries. The company is already working with some of the most prominent names in battery and electric vehicle innovation while only operating for 2+ years. Glimpse is fast, real-time, and integrated with the factory floor. Their platform reduces scan times from 30-90 minutes to just a couple minutes today with a roadmap to get to sub 10 second scans this year. After acquiring top customers like Lucid Motors (luxury EV maker) and NASA (where failure is not an option!), they announced their $10M Series A in March of 2025 led by TDK Ventures with participation from Flybridge and others. This milestone is a testament to their rapid growth, where Glimpse grew revenue from $0 to passing the seven figure mark, in under a year. In the quarters ahead, the team is focused on building out their GTM motion and reaching the next product & platform milestones to enable faster testing throughput at a consistently high quality. Glimpse has chosen to make Boston their HQ due to its strong engineering ecosystem, a growing network of battery-focused startups, and the specialized resources of Greentown Labs. The Glimpse team is on the hunt for engineering talent with a passion for working “close to the metal” bridging the gap between cloud and edge computing. Operators to Know: -Bailey Buscarino, Founding Backend Engineer -Amariah Condon, Founding Operations Engineer -Kayla Goodale, Business Operations Associate -Brian Loughran, Software Engineer  -Owen Miles, Founding Full Stack Engineer -Easton Rasgon, Head of Sales -Jim Senhert, Founding Image Processing Engineer -Jose R., Computer Vision Engineer If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments Sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

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