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Companies

Great Sky

Superconducting optical chips for AI inference

Raised to date

$25.9M

of $30.7M offered across 1 Form D filing

Still open
$4.8M
Investors
17
Last filed
Jul 23, 2026

About

Great Sky is a Boulder, Colorado company building a new class of computing hardware for AI, spun out of more than a decade of research at NIST. Its architecture, Superconducting Optoelectronic Networks (SOENs), pairs superconducting circuits operating at cryogenic temperatures with optical links able to carry signals as faint as a single photon, and is designed around neuroscience-inspired system design. The company has taped out and is running inference on its first chips, and announced a $14M seed round led by Bison Ventures alongside its public launch in March 2026. The founding team - CEO Jeff Shainline, CTO Jeff Chiles, VP of Fabrication Saeed Khan and VP of Architecture Bryce Primavera - are all former NIST researchers.

Rather than optimizing conventional silicon, Great Sky computes with superconductors and communicates with light, an approach it claims delivers orders-of-magnitude gains in efficiency and performance over transistor-based AI hardware, built on 12 years of NIST research and more than 20 peer-reviewed publications.

Funding

  • EquityFiled Jul 23, 2026Form D
    $25.9M/ $30.7M

Product

Superconducting Optoelectronic Networks (SOENs)

AI accelerator hardware

Custom-designed AI chips that perform computation in superconducting circuits and move data optically, packaged as an AI-native hardware platform for inference. First chips have been taped out and are running inference.

  • Superconducting circuits for computation at cryogenic temperatures
  • Optical communication links sensitive down to a single photon
  • Neuroscience-inspired system architecture

Built for

Large-scale AI infrastructure operators, plus defense/national security, energy and scientific computing users

People on file