Thomas Sohmers

He writes on his personal website that in 2009, at 13, he built his first creation, the EyePC, a monocular head-mounted display. The site’s project page says the EyePC was built over the summer of 2009 from scavenged parts, with its final plastic case made in November 2009; it was attached to regular glasses with Velcro and paperclips, or to large sunglasses with Velcro alone, and connected to a jailbroken second-generation iPod Touch through a composite video input. On the page he adds: “Should have combed my hair.”⁠[1][2]

His résumé lists him as owner of EyePC from November 2009 to December 2010, describing it as a business making consumer head-mounted displays and wearable computing systems.⁠[3]

Fox News wrote in 2011 that he built a head-mounted display for a student he had met through a school “buddy” program pairing high-school students with college mentors, which led to an invitation to a meeting of the MIT Entrepreneurs Club, where he met Kurt Keville, coordinator of the MIT Soldier Design Competition. Kurt Keville recalled thinking at the time: “Hey, this guy really knows his hardware,” adding, “And, as it turns out, a lot of software, too.”⁠[4]

His résumé lists him as a researcher at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies in Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, from February 2010 to May 2013, rapidly prototyping augmented reality, gestural interfaces and laser communications for possible military use. His personal website describes it as an Army research lab at MIT where he interned for three years, starting with rapid prototyping of soldier utilities before becoming more interested in embedded and high-performance computing systems.⁠[3][1]

Sources differ on the age at which he began research at MIT. Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry’s 2017 colloquium biography says he began a three-year research affiliation with MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at 13, first as a user of high-performance computing systems and later as a builder of them; the Supercomputing Frontiers 2016 biography says that from 13 he designed and built high-performance computing clusters there; a chapter title of the 2024 Microarch Club episode reads “Starting Research at MIT at age 14.”⁠[5][6][7]

On September 12, 2011, Fox News published a story drawn from the Boston Herald describing him as 15 and a sophomore at the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School in Marlboro who hacked defunct tablet computers for fun. The article says that he and Kurt Keville brainstormed soldier gadgets with other MIT engineers, including communication devices made from laser pointers and solar cells and 360-degree cameras built from several Microsoft Kinect units, and that he was then porting GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s Android operating system to HP’s discontinued TouchPad tablet.⁠[4]

In the article he said, “Ideally, I’d like to start a computer company,” and “I have a real fascination with wearable computers and augmented reality.”⁠[4]

His résumé lists him as school and student coordinator at Primer Labs from November 2011 to November 2012, integrating school curricula into Code Hero, a game that teaches programming, and handling school partnerships and feedback.⁠[3]

His résumé lists him as an Android development consultant for Epson America from January 2012 to April 2013, developing applications for the Epson Moverio BT-100 transparent head-mounted display.⁠[3]

He writes on his personal website that he wrote an app for these smart glasses, which ran Android 2.2, that used the handset’s single-finger touchpad and D-pad to control an ARDrone while streaming video from one or both of its cameras; he describes the device as horrible to develop for but fun as a hack.⁠[8]

His personal website documents a cluster computer housed in a Rubbermaid trashcan: 48 Pandaboard boards based on the OMAP 4430/4460, 96 cores in all, powered by a 400-watt solar panel charging a 12-volt car battery that fed an inverter. A photo on the site of him with the cluster is dated June 17, 2012; the page metadata names Kurt Keville of MIT and Michael Larabel of Phoronix as appearing in the photos.⁠[9]

The site’s interviews page records that in March 2013 he showed part of the cluster with Robert Scoble at SXSW in Austin.⁠[10]

On May 9, 2013, Entrepreneur published (from Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry) the list of the 20 Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry recipients that year, each receiving $100,000 to leave school and build a company; he was the 16th entry, aged 17 and from Hudson, Massachusetts. The list describes him as a technology geek and hardware hacker who had worked at an MIT research lab since age 13 on projects including augmented-reality eyewear and laser communication systems, and who was developing a new computing platform that clusters very low-powered processors, with the aim of changing the server, cloud and research computing industries.⁠[11]

His résumé lists “2013 Thiel Fellow” from May 2013, in the San Francisco Bay Area, saying that he worked on an embedded cluster computing company during the fellowship and that it provides a “no-strings-attached” grant of $100,000 and mentorship to skip college. Business Insider wrote in 2014 that he was in the program’s third class and that, because fellows may not be enrolled in school, he moved from Massachusetts to the Bay Area. SiliconANGLE describes it as a two-year, $100,000 fellowship.⁠[3][12][13]

He applied more than once. Business Insider writes that he applied three times and quotes him: “I first applied when I was 14”; SiliconANGLE says this was his third application; his school newspaper, The AMSA Voice, writes that he had also applied in his freshman and sophomore years, and that he learned of the fellowship as a freshman on a trip to Google’s Bay Area headquarters with Kelly Powers, the former chair of the school’s computer science department, and a few other students; he recalled that a woman from IRobot introduced him to the fellowship, and on hearing he had been selected he was “in disbelief.” Business Insider writes that his parents were at first unsupportive of his applications but backed him after seeing how he spent his time at MIT. The AMSA Voice writes that his mother, Penny Mills, supported his decision to leave school; she said: “It’s an opportunity that you don’t just throw away.”⁠[12][13][14]

His résumé says he left the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School as a junior to accept the Thiel Fellowship; Business Insider writes that he left high school in the 11th grade and did not plan to return, and The AMSA Voice that he left midway through his junior year in 2013, at 16. On his age at selection, the list gives 17, and a Microarch Club chapter title also has him dropping out and starting the fellowship at 17, while a Kisaco Research speaker biography says he became a Thiel Fellow at 18. DFJ Growth writes that he dropped out of high school to pursue a Thiel Fellowship.⁠[3][12][14][11][7][15][16]

His personal website says that he was part of the 2013 class of the Thiel “20 under 20” Fellowship and started REX Computing later that year. Stanford University’s colloquium biography says he founded REX Computing in 2013 as a recipient of Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry’s “20 Under 20 Fellowship,” with the goal of improving energy efficiency in high-performance computing by an order of magnitude; he recalled in the Cerebral Valley interview that at REX Computing he designed and built processors for mobile base stations and high-performance computing starting when he was 17. His résumé, however, dates his role as co-founder and CEO of REX Computing from October 2012, in Oakland, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[1][5][17][3]

SiliconANGLE wrote in 2014 that he first conceived the low-power multi-core product during more than three years at MIT, that the company grew out of a project exploring ARM processors, and that he started it once he received the fellowship. The Microarch Club episode’s chapters move from evaluating ARM processors and the Calxeda processor for high-performance computing, and scaling out low-power processors for data-center compute, to incorporating REX Computing and then deciding against ARM and designing a new architecture.⁠[13][7]

Sources differ on the co-founders. Business Insider wrote in 2014 that REX Computing’s co-founder and chief technology officer was Kurt Keville, then 52, whom he had met at MIT. REX Computing’s website lists two co-founders instead: he leads architecture and operations, and his co-founder Paul handles low-level software and tool development, studied computer science at Georgia Tech, worked for 18 months at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and was in the 2012 class of Thiel Fellows; a chapter of the Microarch Club episode is titled “Paul Sebexen” (00:48:08). The site also lists three advisors: John Gustafson, Bill Boas and Kevin Moran.⁠[12][18][7]

On January 28, 2014, Business Insider wrote that he had unveiled REX Computing’s first product at the Open Compute Project Summit in San Francisco, a fast server built with multi-core ARM processors designed for servers, which he said was “2,500% more power-efficient for the same performance.” The same day SiliconANGLE wrote that on theCUBE he showed Adapteva’s Parallella board, saying its 16-core co-processor delivers about 30 GFLOPS at about 2 watts and “is beating the Intel CPU performance per Watt”; REX had built a prototype filled with these boards in about three weeks and offered it as a development platform to the summit’s hackathon participants.⁠[12][13]

SiliconANGLE writes that he found software for ARM and co-processors hard to build because companies do not want to port their software, and that REX was looking for ways to ease development of highly scalable systems; he also said that as an entrepreneur he felt he was contributing value to society, far more than he could in high school. Business Insider quotes him as saying that researchers “care less about the degrees that you have” than about what people can actually do, and: “If I don’t end up changing the world with this I can find something else.” His website’s interviews page lists a theCUBE interview at Open Compute Summit V in January 2014. Fortune’s Stacey Higginbotham writes that she first met him at a Facebook hackathon in early 2014.⁠[13][12][10][19]

His résumé lists him as co-lead of the Open Compute Project’s high-performance computing (HPC) project from August 2014, organizing and planning the group’s work on open standards for high-performance computing. Fortune wrote in 2015 that he headed the Open Compute Project’s HPC group, and Stanford University’s 2017 biography describes him as a former project lead of that group.⁠[3][19][5]

The AMSA Voice wrote in January 2015 that he had been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list; he said, “In November I received some questions from ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry,” and, hearing nothing more, assumed he had not been selected, and was “shocked and happy” when he learned he had been; the Supercomputing Frontiers 2016 speaker biography says he was featured on the 2015 Forbes “30 under 30” list.⁠[14][6]

On January 17, 2015, The AMSA Voice, the newspaper of the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School, published a profile by Alli Caulfield describing him as 18 and CEO of REX Computing in Palo Alto, California, working with four other people on high-speed, low-energy servers and processors, with the goal of making computing power cheap and easy to access, in his words “To help technology become as much of a commodity as water and electricity”; he said the hardest part of being CEO was building technology that had “never been done before.” The profile says that the previous summer he and his mother attended what would have been his high-school graduation.⁠[14]

The profile quotes him: “I like being judged by my work and not having things directly associated with me”; “AMSA did teach me to go out there and interact with the world”; and “If I was 50, the work I am doing would be just as important.” He said: “My [computing] interests are not well represented in the AMSA curriculum”; the profile says he had long felt he would not go on to college, a feeling confirmed when he attended the South by South West conference in Austin. Mike Lubawski, his sophomore-year English teacher and then chair of the English department, said: “Thomas is bright but doesn’t follow the system well,” and had encouraged him to move to California to work in technology; he also said: “Thomas is really an old soul in a young body.”⁠[14]

On March 12, 2015, Nicole Hemsoth Prickett of The Next Platform described REX Computing’s Neo processor: a 256-core MIMD processor with 64-bit cores, each about 1/145 the size of a fourth-generation Haswell core and 1/27 that of a 32-bit ARM Cortex-A15, claimed at 256 gigaflops double precision and 512 gigaflops single precision; each core had its own local SRAM (128 KB in the article’s example), using a physically addressed SRAM “scratchpad” in place of caches, without virtual memory translation, and quad-issue VLIW; the first 256-core chip was expected at the earliest by the end of 2016 on a 28-nanometer process, at 65 gigaflops per watt. He said in the article: “Caches and virtual memory as they are currently implemented are some of the worst design decisions that have ever been made.”⁠[20]

On March 27, 2015, SiliconANGLE published an account of his interview with theCUBE host Jeff Frick at the Open Compute Project Summit: REX had begun with the goal of building the world’s most power-efficient supercomputers, concluded that existing processors had fundamental design problems, and set out to design its own processor architecture and instruction set on the principle that “memory movement is expensive and doing the actual computation is much cheaper”; he hoped to tape out the 256-core processor “in the next 12 – 18 months.” He took the U.S. Department of Energy as an example: its energy use is capped at 20 megawatts and it wants to reach an exaflop, while it then achieved about 3 to 4 gigaflops per watt and needed about 50; he predicted that the power pressures of high-performance computing would reach other sectors in a “two to five year time frame.” His website’s interviews page lists a theCUBE interview at Open Compute Summit VI in March 2015.⁠[21][10]

On July 21, 2015, Fortune’s Stacey Higginbotham wrote that he was the 19-year-old founder and CEO of REX Computing, had never finished high school and had worked at MIT, and that the company had raised $1.25 million from Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry’s FF Science Fund and planned to produce sample batches of its chip in mid-2016. The article says he claimed the 256-core Neo processor was more powerful and about 25 times more energy efficient than what major vendors offered, at 64 gigaflops per watt; the company would start with digital signal processors and cellular base stations, taking on chipmakers such as Texas InstrumentsTexas InstrumentsTexas Instruments Incorporated is an American company that designs and manufactures semiconductors. Its operations began in 1930, and it is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.Open the full entry, before moving into machine learning and graphics processor workloads served by NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry and AMDAMDAMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) is a publicly traded U.S. semiconductor company founded in 1969 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California; its stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker AMD. The company develops CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, adaptive systems-on-chip and related software, mainly for the data center, personal computer, gaming and embedded markets; its product brands include Ryzen, EPYC, Radeon and Instinct.Open the full entry; he claimed that for some computer vision calculations Neo was 10 to 15 times more efficient than existing GPUs. He said his lack of industry experience helped him see the need for a fundamental design change, since he looked at the problem without “20 years hindsight.” REX Computing’s website also states that the company received $1.25 million from Founders Fund.⁠[19][18]

On July 22, 2015, The Next Platform wrote that REX Computing, led by him at not yet twenty, had closed a first round of $1.25 million and won close to $100,000 in DARPA funds under the “Programming New Computers” part of a DARPA solicitation, aimed at automatic scratchpad memory tools; the team was about five people and planned to grow to seven. The article says the Neo instruction set and basic core design were complete, with verified RTL targeted for the end of 2015, first samples in mid-2016 and production in mid-2017 on TSMCTSMCTSMC is a semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, that pioneered the pure-play foundry model and manufactures chips for hundreds of customers worldwide.Open the full entry’s 28-nanometer process, the design using the Chisel hardware description language; he estimated about $250,000 to get 100 chips, packaged, from TSMC, and was working with Jim Ang at Sandia on modeling tools for Neo. The article says the company shifted its public messaging toward telecom and embedded markets because investors found high-performance computing hard to fund; he said of the term: “It’s basically a cursed word in the Silicon Valley investor community.”⁠[22]

The Supercomputing Frontiers 2016 speaker biography describes him as founder and CEO of the fabless semiconductor startup REX Computing, which, after securing DARPA and venture funding in 2015, planned to tape out its first silicon in spring 2016; he led the architectural design of a processor intended to deliver up to 10 times the energy efficiency of the state of the art. It says that he never completed a formal degree but had long studied electronics and computer architecture and had broad knowledge of computer systems and their history.⁠[6]

On February 22, 2017, he spoke at Stanford University’s EE Computer Systems Colloquium on “The REX Neo Architecture: An energy efficient new processor architecture for HPC, DSP, Machine Learning, and more.” The abstract says that REX Computing’s four-person team spent under $2 million to take the design to a 16-core test chip fabricated on TSMC’s 28-nanometer process in under a year; the talk covered the Neo instruction set, the microarchitecture of the test silicon and a live hardware and software demonstration. The speaker biography describes him as founder and CEO of REX Computing, leading the development of the Neo architecture.⁠[5]

He recalled in a 2024 Cerebral Valley interview that after REX Computing he worked on some cryptocurrency ASICs, then joined a friend’s startup, LambdaLambdaLambda is an American AI cloud computing company founded in 2012 by Stephen Balaban and Michael Balaban. It initially sold GPU workstations and servers for deep learning, later shifted to renting out cloud computing capacity based on Nvidia GPUs, and builds supercomputers and “AI factories” for AI training and inference.Open the full entry, as principal hardware architect to build its GPU cloud, and later joined Groq as director of technology strategy. The RAISE Summit 2025 speaker biography says that as principal hardware architect at Lambda he built the original hardware deployments for Lambda Cloud.⁠[17][23]

On October 27, 2021, Groq issued a press release on new senior hires, stating that he had been principal hardware architect at Lambda Labs and had joined Groq as head of distributed systems, and quoting him: “Groq offers the opportunity to have a greater impact on the product and its development.” The release adds that Madhura Nataraju, head of product, worked alongside him, Tim Sears and Edward Kmett.⁠[24]

RAISE Summit, VentureBeat and DFJ Growth all describe him as a former director of technology strategy at Groq.⁠[23][25][16]

Positron AI’s website says the company was founded in April 2023 with a $6.5 million seed round, with the aim of stopping GPUs from “bankrupting everyone trying to deploy AI.” EE Times’ Sally Ward-Foxton writes that the company was founded in April 2023 by him and chief scientist Edward Kmett, both formerly of Groq; eeNews Europe writes that it was founded in 2023 by a team from Groq. He said in the Cerebral Valley interview that he decided to start Positron after seeing the explosive growth of generative AI workloads.⁠[26][27][28][17]

Positron AI’s website says the company had its first prototype in December 2023 and gave a public demonstration running the LLaMA-2 7B model at NeurIPS 2023. The Microarch Club episode page links his post on X about the NeurIPS exhibit in the corresponding chapter.⁠[26][7]

On February 28, 2024, the Microarch Club podcast released its tenth episode, with him as guest, running 1 hour 22 minutes 31 seconds. The episode description says he discussed dropping out of high school at 17 to start a chip company and the AI hardware appliances he and his team were building at Positron AI.⁠[7]

The chapters run, in order: growing up around computers (00:03:13); learning Python, C and Arduino C (00:07:05); learning about the Thiel Fellowship (00:07:44); starting research at MIT at 14 (00:09:24); the MIT ISN lab (00:11:09); incorporating REX Computing (00:13:42); Facebook and the Open Compute Project (00:14:18); deciding against ARM and designing a new architecture (00:14:49 to 00:16:26); computer-architecture history including Multiflow, VLIW and Intel’s Itanium (00:18:23 to 00:32:27); REX’s Neo architecture (00:35:29); what happened to the Neo chips (00:59:02); winding down REX (01:00:51); Positron AI (01:05:11); and topics such as performance per dollar against the NVIDIA H100 (01:06:07) and the software interface of an inference accelerator.⁠[7]

Positron AI’s website says its first product, Atlas, shipped in August 2024, with the first server deployed to a customer, 18 months from conception. The RAISE Summit 2025 speaker biography says the company’s first-generation product began shipping in 2024.⁠[26][23]

On September 24, 2024, Cerebral Valley’s “CV Deep Dive” series published an interview with him as founder and CEO of Positron. He said: “Positron is building hardware to accelerate transformer models”; its first-generation product was an FPGA-based accelerator appliance for on-premises or cloud deployment, with a next-generation ASIC in development. He said that in a Llama 3.1 8B demonstration against two NVIDIA H100 modules, Positron reached about 270 tokens per second per user against about 160 for NVIDIA, at roughly a third of the power per token, and claimed 3 to 4 times the performance per dollar and per watt of NVIDIA GPU systems, at under half the cost of an NVIDIA DGX H100.⁠[17]

The interview says the company then had about 21 employees with more than 500 years of combined chip and system design experience. He said the team “haven’t slept much in the last year and a half!” and that its culture is that “no job is above or below anyone”; he described transformers as “heavily memory bound” during inference and said the current path of NVIDIA-based spending “is not sustainable for the world.”⁠[17]

On February 11, 2025, Positron announced from Reno, NevadaNevadaNevada is a state in the western United States bordered by Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and California; its capital is Carson City. It was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, as the 36th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,104,614.Open the full entry, that it had raised $23.5 million from Flume Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides ManagementAtreides ManagementAtreides Management (Atreides Management, LP) is an investment management firm based in Boston, founded in 2019 by former Fidelity portfolio manager Gavin Baker. It follows a crossover strategy, investing in high-growth technology and consumer companies in both public and private markets.Open the full entry and Resilience Reserve; the release named him as co-founder and chief technology officer, a Thiel Fellow and an experienced entrepreneur, with Mitesh Agrawal, formerly of Lambda, as newly appointed CEO and Edward Kmett as co-founder and chief scientist. The next day Nick Flaherty of eeNews Europe wrote that Mitesh Agrawal had taken over as CEO and that he had moved from CEO to chief technology officer.⁠[29][28]

EE Times’ Sally Ward-Foxton writes that Mitesh Agrawal joined that month and that Positron then had 15 employees; its Atlas inference appliances used Altera Agilex-7M FPGAs, with PCIe card assembly in Camarillo, California, final assembly and test in Spokane, Washington, planned to move to Reno, and a planned inference ASIC to be fabricated in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry on TSMC’s N5 process; a tier-2 cloud service provider had received the first systems in a multimillion-dollar order. eeNews Europe writes that the FPGAs are built in Chandler, ArizonaArizonaArizona is a state in the southwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912, as the 48th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 7,151,502.Open the full entry, and that the company planned to use IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry’s foundry services.⁠[27][28]

On July 28, 2025, Positron AI announced an oversubscribed $51.6 million Series A led by Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management and DFJ Growth, with Flume Ventures (which includes Scott McNealy), Resilience Reserve, 1517 Fund and Unless participating, bringing its total raised that year to over $75 million; the release named him as co-founder and chief technology officer, gave the company’s headquarters as Reno, Nevada, and its founding year as 2023, and described the first-generation Atlas and the next-generation Titan system planned for 2026 with its custom Asimov silicon. DFJ Growth writes that it invested in the round and describes him as Positron’s founder and CTO, who led the development of several chips before 30 and has more than a decade of semiconductor experience.⁠[30][16]

The next day VentureBeat’s Carl Franzen quoted him: “A key differentiator is our ability to run frontier AI models with better efficiency—achieving 2x to 5x performance per watt and dollar compared to Nvidia”; “If a customer had to change their behavior or their actions in any way, shape or form, that was a barrier”; “We see a future where every person might have a capable model on their phone, but those will still rely on large models in data centers to generate deeper insights”; and “We’re focused entirely on purely air-cooled deployments.” The article says CloudflareCloudflareCloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc.) is a network infrastructure and security company headquartered in San Francisco that describes itself as a connectivity cloud company. Founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway, it uses its global network to provide content delivery, security and developer platform services for websites and applications, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2019 under the symbol NET.Open the full entry uses Atlas, as does Parasail through its SnapServe platform.⁠[25]

On February 4, 2026, Positron AI announced an oversubscribed $230 million Series B at a post-money valuation of over $1 billion, co-led by ARENA Private Wealth, Jump TradingJump TradingJump Trading is a proprietary trading firm headquartered in Chicago. It was founded in 1999 by two former Chicago Mercantile Exchange pit traders, built its business on algorithmic and high-frequency trading, and trades equities, options, credit, commodities, futures, and digital assets. Since 2021 its crypto business has operated under the Jump Crypto brand and has worked on blockchain infrastructure projects including Wormhole, Pyth, and Firedancer; in December 2024 its subsidiary Tai Mo Shan settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over trading related to TerraUSD, paying about $123 million without admitting or denying the findings.Open the full entry and Unless, with Qatar Investment AuthorityQatar Investment AuthorityQatar Investment Authority (QIA) is the wealth manager for the State of Qatar, investing the State’s surpluses with the overarching objective of creating long-term value. It is headquartered in Doha.Open the full entry, Arm and Helena joining as new strategic investors and Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, DFJ Growth, Resilience Reserve, Flume Ventures and 1517 participating; the release said the next-generation Asimov silicon was targeted for tape-out in late 2026 and production in early 2027, and its photo caption names him as CTO and co-founder.⁠[31]

On September 10, 2026, Positron AI announced $875 million in Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation, made up of a $375 million Series C at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation and a Series C-1 of up to $500 million; the co-leads were NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysisSemiAnalysisSemiAnalysis is a semiconductor and AI research firm founded by Dylan Patel in 2020. It produces reporting, institutional data models, consulting and hardware testing, covering chip manufacturing, memory, datacenters, inference costs and AI economics.Open the full entry Capital (Dylan PatelDylan PatelDylan Patel is the founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis, researching semiconductor supply chains, datacenters and AI economics. He started the business in 2020 and expanded individual industry writing into data models, consulting and technical testing, while discussing inference costs and hardware–software co-design.Open the full entry) and Jim Clark, the strategic investors included VentureTech Alliance, Hudson River TradingHudson River TradingHudson River Trading is a proprietary trading firm headquartered at 3 World Trade Center in New York. Through its broker-dealer HRT Financial LP it trades for its own account and makes markets in US equities, options and futures, and it also handles part of the customer order flow of the retail broker Robinhood.Open the full entry, CiscoCiscoCisco Systems, Inc. is an American networking technology company, incorporated in 1984, headquartered in San Jose, California, and listed on Nasdaq.Open the full entry Investments and Naver Ventures, and DFJ Growth, Qatar Investment Authority and others participated. The release says the first-generation Atlas inference system was shipping, with more than 50 racks being deployed at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; the next-generation Asimov chip uses TSMC’s N3P process and pairs with 288 GB to 2,304 GB of memory per chip, and the next-generation Titan system combines four to eight Asimov chips; Forest Baskett, Gavin BakerGavin BakerGavin Baker is an American investor who founded the Boston investment manager Atreides Management in 2019 and serves as its managing partner and chief investment officer. He worked at Fidelity Investments from 1999 to 2017 and managed the Fidelity OTC Portfolio from 2009 to 2017.Open the full entry, Thomas Jermoluk and Dylan Patel joined the board.⁠[32]

As of November 2026, Positron AI’s website lists him as Chairman of its board, alongside CEO Mitesh Agrawal, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Randy Glein of DFJ Growth, Forest Baskett of NEA, Rob ReidRob ReidRob Reid is an American entrepreneur, science-fiction author, podcaster and venture capitalist who founded Listen.com, which launched the Rhapsody on-demand streaming music service; he wrote the novels Year Zero and After On, hosts the After On podcast and runs the venture fund Resilience Reserve with Chris Anderson.Open the full entry of Resilience Reserve, Thomas Jermoluk of the Jim Clark family office, Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis and Ari Schottenstein of Arena. The site says the company has more than 100 employees across the United States, Canada and Israel, with offices in Reno, Las Vegas, Spokane and Austin, and that in August 2026 more than 50 racks were deployed at OracleOracleOracle (Oracle Corporation) is a U.S. enterprise software and cloud computing company founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. Starting with relational databases, it expanded into enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure, hardware, and industry systems, and broadened its product range through acquisitions of companies such as Sun Microsystems, NetSuite, and Cerner.Open the full entry.⁠[26]

The AMSA Voice writes that he attended elementary school in Hudson and lived in Massachusetts before moving to California; his résumé gives his years at the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School, a combined middle and high school, as 2007 to 2013. His mother is Penny Mills. She said the family gave him a computer as soon as he could sit up and hold a mouse, that he was bullied from first grade through fifth grade, that he “has matured quite a bit” and learned to network with older people, and that “He has a great memory.”⁠[14][3]

He writes on his personal website that he began tinkering with simple electronics kits at 6 and taught himself the basics of electrical engineering and computer science. Fox News writes that at about 6 he worked with his father on a new plastic shell combining a Sega Genesis and a Super Nintendo; he said it “didn’t really get there,” adding, “I was young. I didn’t know what I was doing.” Chapters of the Microarch Club episode cover growing up around computers, digging beneath the software, and learning Python, C and Arduino C.⁠[1][4][7]

His personal website records several hacks in order: first the Sony Google TV (getting into the recovery menu), which began with an original post, grew into long hours on IRC and became the GTVhacker group, and was also his first coverage by Engadget; then running Ubuntu in a chroot jail on the Motorola Xoom to make full use of its Tegra 2 dual-core processor, the site calling the Xoom the first dual-core Android device and adding that he later tried to get iOS and other operating systems running on it but did not document that work well.⁠[8]

He writes on his personal website that he enjoys augmented and virtual reality, general hardware hacking and tinkering, science fiction in movies, shows, books and games, and playing guitar. The AMSA Voice lists his interests as rock music, guitar, science fiction and history.⁠[1][14]

He spoke at Supercomputing Frontiers 2016 and was on the speaker list of RAISE Summit 2025, whose biography says he had founded two earlier semiconductor startups. Kisaco Research’s page for his session “The Gigawatt Gambit: The Economic and Environmental Impact of Global AI Inference Deployment” describes him as founder and CEO of Positron AI and says that after REX Computing he worked on scaling GPU clouds and large language models.⁠[6][23][15]

Personal website: https://www.trsohmers.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/trsohmers (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies: Official website: https://isn.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[34]

REX Computing: Official website: https://rexcomputing.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

Open Compute Project: Official website: https://www.opencompute.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35]

Lambda: Official website: https://lambda.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

Groq: Official website: https://groq.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[37]

Positron AI: Official website: https://www.positron.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[38]