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🚀 AI Infra Keeps on Turnin! Recap: AI INFRA

AI INFRA SUMMIT wasn’t just another stop on the tech-event circuit—it was a full-throttle convergence of the people building the backbone of AI. We filled Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus with 800+ enterprise leaders, cloud builders, infra architects, founders, and investors. It was standing room only. A sold-out, record-breaking crowd.

• The agenda? 🔥 Strategic, dense, and real.

• The people? 🔥 Scrappy upstarts, enterprise players and tech giants.

• The vibe? 🔥 Real. Raw. Remarkably human

📸 Fantastic Shots by Kevin Mei: https://kevinmei.pixieset.com/aiinfrasummit3/

🧠 3 BIG THEMES

1. Infra Is the Bottleneck—And the Opportunity Whether it’s GPUs, cooling, or orchestration, infrastructure is now the arena where real value—and real competition—lives.

2. Optionality Rules From ROCm acceleration to multi-cloud LLM deployment, the playbook is no longer one-size-fits-all. Infra has to flex. Teams from AMD, Microsoft, WEKA, and Supermicro showed us how.

3. Ecosystem > Ego Every great conversation—whether on stage or over espresso—was rooted in collaboration. From cloud to silicon, edge to grid, one thing’s clear: no one company can build this future alone.

🔥 FROM SUNRISE TO AFTERPARTY

We kicked off with the Women in AI Breakfast (60+ strong), rolled through 30+ sessions across three stages, 3 recorded stages, 3+ live streams, and closed with a dance off and performance at the Computer History Museum.

📈 WHAT'S NEXT

AI infra is no longer a back-office concern—it’s the core of strategy. If you’re scaling LLM stacks, navigating token economics, or solving for heat and latency, you’re not reacting to the future. You’re shaping it.

Let’s keep that momentum going.

🎟 Pre-register now for AI INFRA 4 → https://lu.ma/aiinfra_4

p.s. If you attended AI INFRA SUMMIT we want to hear from you. 📣 Tag us with a recap post (takeaways, learnings, highlights) and we’ll send you an early VIP pass for the next one.

// Behind the Scenes @ AI INFRA SUMMIT

//Whats Next

💵Bay Area Startups Collectively Secured $624M This Week

$624M went to Bay Area startups this week, taking the April-to-date and almost-final total to $9.6B. It was a second slow week for megadeals – only two, Persona ($200M) and Veza ($108M). Vertical AI – in security, manufacturing, healthcare, engineering and biotech – was the bulk of this week's fundings.

The next edition of SV Tech, Talent & Investment Trends is next Friday, May 9^th @12PM PT. Join Bob Karr, Dawn DeBruyn and WITI's David Leighton as we look at April and Q2, with some big changes in expectations around exits, effects on funding and startup entrepreneurs. Also: the latest in AI funding and the chip wars, new tech funded in biotech, medtech. cleantech, and women-led companies. More details and register here.

On exits: There were fourteen acquisitions this week, double last week's. All fourteen acquisitions were for undisclosed amounts. The absence of tech IPO activity continues, now exacerbated by tariff news and general uncertainty. While Figma filed confidentially earlier this month in a surprising move – given the overall state of the public market - they didn't announce a date, set shares or price the transaction.

Follow us on LinkedIn to stay on top of what's happening in 2025 in startup fundings, M&A and IPOs, VC fundraising plus new executive hires & investor moves.

Early Stage:

• Nuvo closed a $45M Series A, building the infrastructure that accelerates the trade of physical goods with products spanning business identity, connectivity, risk management, and more.

• P-1 AI closed a $23M Seed, building engineering AGI for the physical world.

• Stately Bio closed a $12M Seed, developing next-generation regenerative medicines with the world's most advanced ML cell imaging platform.

• Mivium closed a $5M Regulation A (crowdfunding), advanced semiconductor materials. that outperform traditional silicon-based semiconductors in industries such as power electronics, aerospace, telecommunications, AI infrastructure, photonics, and biotechnology.

• Hinalea Imaging closed a $4.7M Seed, provides intelligent imaging solutions combining hyperspectral imaging with advanced neural network-powered analytics systems for quality assurance, testing and inspection applications.

Growth Stage:

• Persona closed a $200M Series D, a unified identity platform that provides the building blocks businesses need to securely collect, verify, manage, and make decisions about identity.

• Veza closed a $108M Series D, their Access Platform goes beyond identity governance and administration (IGA) tools to visualize, monitor, and control entitlements so that organizations can stay compliant and achieve least privilege.

• Plenful closed a $50M Series B, the leading AI workflow automation platform transforming how healthcare teams work.

• Doppel closed a $35M Series B, an enterprise-ready security platform is built to neutralize social engineering threats targeting your executives, employees, and third parties before they damage your business.

• Kintsugi closed a $18M Series Unknown, is automating sales tax for every company globally. Sales tax automation when you want it; white-glove treatment when you need it.

WEKA | The High-Performance Data Engine for the Agentic AI Era

The WEKA® Data Platform isn’t just storage—it’s a high-performance data engine, purpose-built for the era of agentic AI. It rewires the data path to eliminate legacy bottlenecks and delivers consistent, scalable, lightning-fast performance ⚡across every workload and environment.

Today’s AI demands are fundamentally different. Training frontier models, scaling inference across massive fleets of GPUs, enabling autonomous agents — all require not just more infrastructure, but smarter, faster, and radically more efficient infrastructure. That's where WEKA stands apart.

WEKA helps enterprises tackle the biggest challenges in AI infrastructure:

💸 Improving AI Token Economics: WEKA radically accelerates data access, feeding GPUs and agentic systems at memory-class speeds. That means lower idle times, faster context loading, and dramatically better cost-to-performance ratios.

🚀 Rewiring Latency: Traditional storage measures latency in milliseconds. WEKA speaks in microseconds. Every layer — from kernel-bypassed I/O with DPDK and SPDK, to NVMe-optimized 4K block alignment, to direct GPU access — is engineered to eliminate wait times and maximize computational value.

✅ Scaling Without Silos: WEKA’s fully parallelized architecture shatters the performance limits of legacy systems. Whether on-premises, in the cloud, or across hybrid AI factories, WEKA brings a consistent, unified experience with dynamic elasticity and native support for containerized, cloud-native environments.

Trusted by the World’s AI Leaders

The most ambitious AI-first organizations choose WEKA to power their infrastructure, including Hugging Face, Midjourney, Cohere, Stability AI, ElevenLabs, Physical Intelligence, Contextual AI, Samsung, Novartis, and others at the forefront of discovery and innovation.

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Our mission is to provide an insider's view of Silicon Valley's undercurrents – insights often overlooked by mainstream sources. While many newsletters offer broad market overviews, we focus on delivering a unique, in-depth understanding of the local ecosystem. We share behind-the-scenes conversations, introduce key players we meet at events, and offer exclusive insights.

Your feedback is crucial in helping us refine our content and maintain the newsletter's value for you and your fellow readers. We welcome your suggestions on how we can improve our offering. [email protected] 

Logan Lemery
Head of Content // Team Ignite

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