Short answer: Mitesh Agrawal says he left Lambda, where he was COO and cofounder, in January 2025 to work on the silicon layer, where much of AI's value has accrued. Positron's cofounders are Thomas Sohmers and Edward Kmett.
Watch this answer from Episode 37 (starts at 4:19) · Episode 37 notes and transcript
From Episode 37: Why AI Inference Is So Expensive (And How Positron Is Solving It), starting at 4:19.
Mitesh Agrawal [4:18]: And then our second chip that tapes out later this year, comes out in mid next year, is is gonna be really around, max MBU and max memory capacity. So that's kind of what we're focused on. And then just personally on myself, CEO of Positron AI, I actually joined in, so I like, our original cofounders are Thomas Sohmers, is a Thiel Fellow, has been in the world of silicon for over a decade and a half, built out his first chip when he was, like, a 17 year old kid, with the budget of 2,000,000 from Founders Fund, and I'm pretty sure one of the earliest people to ever having actually taped out a chip, and then Edward Kmett, who is one of the world's foremost software programmer. And I joined in from Lambda, which is where I was COO and co founder, and really came into Positron AI personally because two things. One, just a very personal desire to go and work on the fundamental technology aspect.
Mitesh Agrawal [5:11]: If you look at the world of AI tech you know, AI as a theme and which I believe to be our likes most one of the most important themes, I think it's built on three fundamental technology stacks. One is around energy, So energy generation, energy infrastructure. Two is around the AI models and data itself. Right? And three is all around silicon and networking and compute. Right? So so I think that's kind of the and so Positron is smack dab in the middle of the third one. I really wanted to go down a layer, so cloud is cloud services. It's built on these three layers. I wanted to go down a layer to really work on kind of R and D and technology side of thing on a personal front. And then second, like a little bit on the selfish front is if you look at the value accretion in the market that has happened, maximum has happened in the third that that third kind of layer. Right? Obviously, OpenAI and Anthropic and other model companies have grown massively in value, but if you look at the true ones, you have Nvidia and AMD, which are the big names everyone knows about. But then you have all the networking companies like Credo and Astera, and you have all the power you know, so a lot of the value is accreted in that third layer as well. Right?
Mitesh Agrawal [6:16]: So keeping all those in mind, keeping the trends that that is there, I joined into Positron AI in January 2025. So super excited to be here and talk more about the company, about the ecosystem as well.
Jordan Metzner [6:28]: Awesome. Great intro. Yeah. Great job. Yeah.
