We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund IV has completed an investment in Great Sky, an advanced hardware company building AI chips using superconducting optoelectronic networks. 

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As demand for more intelligent, faster, and energy-efficient AI grows exponentially, the limitations of conventional silicon-based architectures, initially developed in the 1940s, have become increasingly apparent. These limitations manifest in various ways. First, the amount of energy required to run current and future AI models is staggering, an amount of energy that the world will be unable to provide at scale without significant changes to energy policy and production. Second, the limitations of existing GPUs in terms of increasing compute, memory, and data transfer speed are becoming exceedingly difficult to overcome due to dramatically diminishing returns on squeezing more out of existing silicon. And lastly, due to the limitations of GPU structure, highly complex and advanced AI models won’t be able to closely mimic the human brain in the ways they need to, to achieve more complicated breakthroughs. Ultimately, to run many of the future AI models the world hopes to develop, we’ll need to move beyond GPUs to a better AI chip architecture.  

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Great Sky is building AI chips that do not have these limitations. Great Sky’s chips combine superconducting circuits for processing with photonic interconnects for communication. This architecture delivers dramatic improvements in speed, energy efficiency, and scalability. Their solution directly addresses core AI pain points: existing systems are too slow for time-critical applications, consume excessive power, and struggle with the advanced reasoning required for future AI products. With Great Sky’s technology, AI models can run thousands (and possibly millions) of times more efficiently, on lower-cost chip architecture. With a dual business model of offering remote access to cloud-based systems and on-premise deployments for sensitive applications, Great Sky aims to serve customers ranging from OpenAI and DeepMind to DARPA and the Department of Energy. 

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Great Sky is led by Jeff Shainline (CEO), alongside co-founders Jeff Chiles (CTO), Bryce Primavera (VP of Architecture), and Saeed Khan (VP of Fabrication), all of whom previously collaborated at NIST and bring unparalleled expertise in superconductors, photonics, AI, and neuroscience. The founding team invented and remains the only group to demonstrate much of this technology to date. This technology is based on a decade of their research. With early customer validation from major players such as Meta, OpenAI, and Cisco, and support from advisors like Rory McInerney (formerly of Intel) and Mark Wade (CEO of Ayar Labs), Great Sky is poised to redefine what’s possible at the intersection of physics and machine intelligence.

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To learn more about the science behind Great Sky, listen to CEO Jeff Shainline’s interview on the Lex Fridman podcast. 

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Why we’re excited about Great Sky

Rarely does one encounter world experts innovating at the forefront of one of history's biggest technological revolutions, with a product so perfectly aligned with clear future use cases that it feels like a no-brainer to get involved. That is the case with Great Sky. We fell in love with the team, their unique backgrounds, their technical skills, the depth of their research, and ultimately the potential of what they could build. While there is a lot to figure out with a hardware company operating at the cutting edge of physics, if the team can successfully productize their science and demonstrate the efficiency and performance gains supported by their science, the scale of the opportunity is absolutely enormous. We like to include a few investments like this in our portfolio where the upside potential is so remarkably significant. 

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