Manufacturing
“We’re going head-to-head with what’s currently the second-largest company in the world—Nvidia,” says Thomas Sohmers, founder of Positron AI. The startup, founded in early 2023, has taken direct aim at Nvidia’s dominance in AI hardware, specifically in the expanding field of generative AI inference. Positron AI, founded in early 2023, has positioned itself as a challenger by focusing on transformer models and offering unmatched performance per dollar and per watt.
When Sohmers and his team launched Positron, they saw an opportunity to specialize in transformer model inference, a domain where traditional GPU systems, including Nvidia’s, face inefficiencies. "From the very beginning of the company, philosophically, we wanted to have these really small, iterative goals," says Sohmers. This approach allowed the company to rapidly prototype and ship hardware that addresses the specific bottlenecks in transformer-based AI workloads.
Their flagship product, the Atlas, exemplifies this focus. Housing eight Agilix 7M series FPGAs, the Atlas system delivers a 2x improvement in performance per dollar and a 3x improvement in performance per watt compared to Nvidia’s incumbent systems. The use of FPGAs has been pivotal. Unlike companies locked into years-long ASIC development cycles, Positron’s FPGA-based approach has enabled rapid iteration and deployment. "We started in April of 2023 and began shipping our first product in August of 2024—an 18-month turnaround that’s almost unheard of in hardware startups," Sohmers notes.
