What do AI-powered data centers in the middle of the ocean, faster circuit-board manufacturing, and a $6.3 billion acquisition have in common?
You can meet the founders behind all of them at our next showcase. Panthalassa is using ocean waves to power offshore AI compute. Diode designs and manufactures circuit boards in its own factory. Long Lake buys established businesses and puts engineers inside them to rebuild how they operate.
Join us November 18 at OpenAI for our final Startup Showcase of the year. Apply to attend.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson, Founder of Panthalassa
Finding somewhere to build a data center is getting complicated. There’s the grid connection, the land, the cooling water, and the neighbors. Panthalassa is betting on a location with a different set of challenges: the open ocean.
Panthalassa is building autonomous ocean nodes that generate electricity from waves and use that power on-site to run AI inference. Instead of transmitting electricity back to land, the company puts the compute next to the energy, cools it with seawater, and sends the resulting data back over satellite. Garth and the team have been working on the same basic idea for a decade, and Panthalassa patented wave-powered computing grids back in 2018, years before data-center power shortages became a mainstream concern in AI.
This year, the company raised a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel to finish its Oregon manufacturing facility and deploy its first Ocean-3 nodes.
If you’re wondering how you keep an AI data center running in the middle of the Pacific, come meet Garth at the showcase.
Davide Asnaghi, Founder of Diode Computers
Software engineers can change their code and test it in minutes. Hardware engineers often have to send a design to a factory and wait for a finished board before discovering what needs to change. Diode is working to shorten that loop. Customers bring requirements or an existing board, and the company handles design, fabrication, and assembly.
Davide told us that some of the most important work happens in the details of manufacturing. Diode’s models account for things like production yield and drill-bit failure rates. The team has also reverse-engineered manufacturing equipment and written its own software to make production faster and more reliable.
When we spoke, Diode had already shipped more than 400 unique board designs this year. The company raised an $11.4M Series A led by a16z and its customers include Physical Intelligence and Saronic.
If you want to help build hardware that feels more like shipping software, come meet Davide at the showcase.
Varun Shenoy, Founder of Long Lake
Most AI companies build software and then try to convince an old-school business to adopt it. Long Lake skips that step and buys the business.
Long Lake acquires what the team calls “sleepy American industries” and embeds its own engineers directly inside them. That gives Long Lake the workflows, historical data, employees, and customers needed to actually redesign how the business operates with AI. Its engineering team spans a shared platform called Nexus, vertical-specific AI systems, and forward-deployed engineers who sit with users and bring bottlenecks back to the product team.
In September, Long Lake completed its $6.3B acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel, taking the company private and bringing Long Lake’s AI engineering team into one of the world’s largest corporate-travel businesses.
If you want to be at the forefront of deploying AI into the real economy, come meet Varun at the showcase.
Apply to the November 18 showcase to meet these founders in person.