Technology

The Compute 100

The Compute 100 is the home for conversations about compute.

The Compute 100 highlights 100 companies building across the semiconductor and compute value chain — 50 public, 50 private. It spans chip design, fabrication, advanced packaging, memory, power delivery, networking, and the software stack powering AI workloads. This podcast highlights conversations with the operators, builders, and investors shaping the new compute-centric economy.

The podcast is hosted by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, early stage compute investors at Primary.

Latest Episodes:

The Compute 100: Austin Lyons, Analyst & Writer, Chipstrat Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Austin Lyons, the writer behind Chipstrat.

Austin started his career as an engineer — graduate work in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois under semiconductor physicist Eric Pop, followed by time at Intel. From there, he made the shift to analysis and writing, building Chipstrat into one of the most widely-read independent newsletters covering semiconductors, optics, networking, and physical AI. Austin is one of those rare people who can actually read the silicon and explain the market. When people want to know what is really happening in the compute stack, Austin's work is where many of them turn first.

We're excited to have him on for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of the chip industry.

Austin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinlyons/

The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expressed are as of the date of recording, are subject to change, and may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.

The Compute 100: Naveen Rao, Co-founder & CEO of Unconventional AI Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI.

Naveen has built two startups before Unconventional AI, both at critical inflection points in the AI market, often early to trends the world had yet to see. He founded Nervana, acquired by Intel for over $400M, then MosaicML, acquired by Databricks for $1.3B, after which he led AI at Databricks. Now he's after his magnum opus: chips inspired by the architecture of the brain that can run AI at a fraction of today's energy cost. As power becomes the defining constraint on scaling AI, Naveen's thesis is that biology-scale efficiency is the only path forward.

Unconventional AI launched with nearly half a billion dollars at a $4.5B valuation — one of the largest seed rounds ever, backed by Lightspeed, a16z, Sequoia, Lux, DCVC, and Jeff Bezos. Our conversation covered Naveen’s career, the market moment for Unconventional, their early product releases, and his belief that the future of compute will mirror how the physical world computes. Thank you Naveen for joining us!

Naveen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naveengrao/

Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

The Compute 100: Patrick Bowen, CEO of Neurophos Aug 24, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Patrick Bowen, CEO of Neurophos.

Patrick's path into chips started at age nine, when a neighbor taught him to build radios from Radio Shack kits and handed him a college EE textbook, which Patrick read cover to cover, homework included. He later double-majored in physics and EE, then did his PhD at Duke under David R. Smith, the physicist who built the first real invisibility cloak out of metamaterials.

As Patrick puts it, "there's no market for cloaks." But the trick behind them, engineering materials smaller than the wavelength of light, became the seed for Neurophos. The company shrinks optical modulators 10,000x smaller than what's on the market, packing a million onto a fingernail-sized chip instead of one the size of a card table. That density powers Neurophos's T100 optical processing unit, which aims for 50x more compute per wafer. Neurophos closed a $110M Series A backed by Microsoft's M12 earlier this year. We're thrilled to have Patrick on the podcast for a conversation about the physics case for optical over digital compute, why he's targeting the prefill half of inference over decode, and what it will take to make photonics real at data center scale.

Patrick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ptbowen/

Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

The Compute 100: Alex Ksendzovsky, CEO, and Jon Pomeraniec, COO of The Biological Computing Company Jul 30, 2026

Show notes

Today's guests are Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec, co-founders of The Biological Computing Company (TBC).

Check out the demo here! www.tbc.co/demo

Alex and John are both neurosurgeon-neuroscientists who met about fifteen years ago and have done nearly everything together since. Alex is the godfather to John's two kids and signed his wedding documents, in Russian. The idea for TBC traces back to Alex's time as a philosophy student, when he pitched his neuroscience professor on encoding the S&P 500 into a dish of living neurons to predict the stock market. The professor said no. Years later, once they were both practicing neurosurgeons, Alex and John ran the experiment anyway. The market prediction didn't pan out, but it proved something bigger: that real-world data could be encoded into living neurons, processed, and decoded back out again. That became the premise for TBC: growing neurons on dishes wired to thousands of electrodes and deriving learning principles from them to make today's AI models faster, cheaper, and more efficient. The company came out of stealth this year having raised $50M at seed, grown from 5 people to 25, and signed its first paying customers for a neuron-derived video generation model. We're thrilled to have Alex and John on the podcast for a conversation about building the first company with real commercial access to biological compute, why the brain is still the best computer ever built, and what it will take to eventually put neurons directly in the compute loop.

Alex: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-ksendzovsky-31732711/

Jon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-pomeraniec-785a294/

Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

The Compute 100: Shahin Farshchi, General Partner at Lux Capital. Jul 22, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Shahin Farshchi, General Partner at Lux Capital.

Shahin's path into venture started with a failed startup. After a PhD at UCLA designing low-noise amplifiers to capture brain signals, he bootstrapped a wireless biosignal monitoring company and learned the hard way that hospitals wanting a product and hospitals paying for one are very different things. A mentor told him he should raise venture money next time – his response: "What's venture capital?" With no network to speak of, he cold-emailed a list of VC firms offering to scout semiconductor deals. Lux Capital, the first hit on a Google search for "nanotechnology venture capital," wrote back the same day, and he joined full-time in 2006. Nearly 20 years later, he's one of the firm's most active investors in deep tech, backing companies like Majestic Labs, Cognichip, and Unconventional AI. Lux just closed Fund IX at $1.5B, its largest ever, bringing total AUM to roughly $7B. We're thrilled to have Shahin on the podcast for a conversation about the semiconductor cycle, the case for younger founders in chips, and the shrinking universe of venture-scale outcomes.

Shahin: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahinf⁠ Lux Capital: ⁠https://www.luxcapital.com/⁠

Primary: ⁠https://www.primary.vc/⁠

Follow us on X (⁠https://x.com/thecompute100⁠) and check out our daily newsletter (⁠https://newsletter.thecompute100.com/⁠).

The Compute 100: Chase Lochmiller, CEO of Crusoe Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe.

While climbing mountains with his best friend turned co-founder, Chase first learned about gas flares — spots around the world where energy was virtually free. In 2018, the vision was clear: co-locate small data centers next to these flares, mine bitcoin, and scale. But while Crusoe grew its mining business, Chase's core long-term motivation was a side project — using low-cost, clean energy to power compute for AI. Fast forward to 2026: Crusoe is worth over $10B, has sold its bitcoin business, and is building one of the largest data centers in the country in Abilene, TX as part of OpenAI's Stargate project. With over several gigawatts of capacity under management and a newly launched managed inference platform, Crusoe is one of today's most formidable vertically integrated infrastructure companies. Chase sits at the intersection of the two most important markets of our time — energy and compute — and was spectacularly early to the insight that they're intrinsically linked. We loved this conversation with Chase, and hope you do too.

Chase: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chase-lochmiller-604483341/

Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

Jeff Tatarchuk, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of TensorWave Jun 17, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Jeff Tatarchuk, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of TensorWave.

Jeff is a serial entrepreneur who has spent his career building in the cloud and compute space. Before TensorWave, he co-founded VMAccel, an early FPGA cloud and edge provider, alongside his eventual TensorWave co-founder Darrick Horton. In 2023, Jeff found himself in a convo with someone looking for access to GPUs, to which Jeff posed a simple question – “how about AMD?”. The answer – an immediate “I will take anything!” – resulted in what has become Tensorwave. The company was built on a contrarian bet: that the AI world needed a serious alternative to Nvidia. TensorWave runs exclusively on AMD's hardware and ROCm software stack, and that wager is paying off. The company now operates one of the largest AMD-based AI training clusters in North America and recently raised a $350M Series B at a $1.55B valuation, co-led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures, bringing its total funding to roughly $493M. We're thrilled to have Jeff on the podcast for a conversation about building an AMD-native neocloud, the case for an open AI compute ecosystem, and the path to scaling the world beyond NVIDIA.

Jeff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtatarchuk

Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

Jeff Wittich, CPO of Ampere May 26, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Jeff Wittich, CPO of Ampere.

Jeff started his career at Intel at a device engineer, which launched a 15 year run at the company, eventually leading their cloud business and custom CPU program. In 2019, Jeff joined Ampere, where he currently acts as CPO. Ampere made an early bet on power efficiency being core to the future of AI that paid off in a big way with a $6.5B acquisition by Softbank in 2025. We're thrilled to have Jeff on the podcast for a conversation about the resurgence of the CPU, the rising generation of talent in compute and much more.

The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

Lisa Spelman, CEO of Cornelis Networks May 22, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Lisa Spelman.

Lisa is currently the CEO of Cornelis Networks. Lisa's career started at Intel, where she spent almost 19 years, ending her tenure as the GM of Intel's Xeon product, their enteprise CPU line. It was there that Lisa saw the pain around high performance networking on large scale clusters, inspiring the move to the operator side. In 2024, she took the helm at Cornelis Networks, a high-performance networking company spun out of Intel in 2020 built around the OmniPath fabric architecture. Cornelis is purpose-built for the most demanding HPC and AI workloads that require massive, coordinated compute across entire data centers. Cornelis has raised over $140M since its founding in 2020. We're thrilled to have Lisa on the podcast today.

The Compute 100 is led by ⁠Brian Schechter⁠ and ⁠Gaby Lorenzi⁠, compute-focused investors at Primary⁠. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal May 21, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Erik Bernhardsson.

Erik is the founder and CEO of Modal, NYC-based Series C infrastructure startup, most recently valued at $4.65B, up from their Series B at $1.1B. Modal was founded in 2021, in a pre-ChatGPT world, built to ease developer friction around deploying and running ML models at scale. The early product was inspired by Erik's time at Spotify where he built their music recommender system. Since then, Modal has become a go-to solution for developers who want fast inference across LLMs and agents. Modal is growing rapidly, hitting nearly $300M in revenue, driven by demand for their sandboxes product, which let AI agents run in isolated environments. We're thrilled to have Erik on the podcast.

The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

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