Positron Is Betting on Large Models. The Market Is Thinking Small

Positron’s message to the AI world is this: the language models of the future will be massive, and they’ll need inference chips like Atlas to run. The startup, founded in 2023, makes an inference accelerator it says blows past Nvidia’s GPUs in both energy and cost efficiency: “2x to 5x performance per watt and dollar,” according to CEO Mitesh Agrawal. Atlas is air-cooled, runs Nvidia-trained models without any code rewrites, and was shipped into production just 15 months after launch. Early customers include Cloudflare and Parasail. That’s fast execution. Investors seem impressed: Positron just closed a $51.6 million Series A led by Valor Equity, Atreides, and DFJ. Next on the roadmap is Titan, a 2026 system built around Positron’s custom “Asimov” ASICs. The claim?