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.
What sets it apart
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.
