Reno-based AI hardware manufacturing startup Positron announced it had secured $23.5 million in venture capital funding from Incline Village-based Flume Ventures.
Courtesy
In his 2011 State of the State Address, former Gov. Brian Sandoval proclaimed that technology would become a cornerstone of Nevada’s new economy.
It was a bold prediction considering the fact that the state was still deeply mired in the aftereffects of the Great Recession. Nevada’s unemployment in 2011 hovered around 13.5 percent, the highest in the nation by several percentage points. Tourism and gaming, along with construction and mining, still formed the backbone of the Silver State’s economy.
It also proved to be an uncannily accurate forecast. Last week, Reno-based AI hardware manufacturing startup Positron announced it had secured $23.5 million in venture capital funding from Incline Village-based Flume Ventures, whose partners include Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNeally. Positron joins an ever-growing list of technology and advanced manufacturing companies that have planted flags in Northern Nevada over the past decade, including Google, Apple, Tesla, Switch and Redwood Materials.
Sandoval, now president of the University of Nevada, Reno, said Nevada’s flourishing technology industry and rich startup community have far exceeded his initial vision for the state.
“Back in 2011 I talked about a new Nevada where we would be on the ground floor of all of the next big things,” he said. “We put together a strategic plan, and we created the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. I think we have accomplished that objective – this is the casebook for what we hoped for and developed.”
Mitesh Agrawal, Positron’s chief executive officer, told NNBW at a news conference at Reno Public Market that Positron is a U.S.-based alternative to Nvidia’s AI inference hardware (AI inference is the deployment of pretrained AI models to generate predictions or conclusions from new data, as opposed to AI learning, the initial phase of AI training). Positron’s semiconductors are fabricated at Intel’s Ocotillo semiconductor foundry in Chandler, Arizona, with assembly performed in Washington using additional U.S.-made components from Dell, Samsung and Micron.
Using a domestic supply chain reduces dependence on Nvidia’s AI hardware, which is made exclusively in Taiwan, Agrawal said.
“From a product perspective, we initially were all about getting our technology working and getting it to market,” he said. “But then we became about making it as local as possible. Nvidia’s GPUs are entirely made in Taiwan, and for good reason; they use the latest processing node and smallest transistor size, and that’s only available in Taiwan. But we have figured out how to use one- or two-generation older processing nodes and use the American ecosystem for our fab setup.”
Positron was founded in 2023 by Agrawal and Chief Technology Officer Thomas Sohmers. The company shipped its first-generation products in August of last year. Its primary product is its plug-and-play Atlas appliance server that doesn’t require any additional software changes for companies already working in the AI space, Agrawal said.
“You basically just power on the server and it will start supporting all the language models (such as ChatGPT),” Agrawal said. “You can just load and run them.”
Positron has already begun moving some server assembly functions to Northern Nevada, Agrawal said. It’s his hope that one day Nevada becomes a one-stop shop for the entire fabrication process.
“A modern semiconductor fabrication facility is between $15 billion and $20 billion,” Agrawal said. “I can't tell you how much of a dream it is to one day see a fab open in Nevada and have our own semiconductor buildout in the state.
“With where AI is going, semiconductors are going to be a big, big part of our ecosystem and culture,” he added. “There will be a lot more jobs around semiconductor fabrication and setup.”
Agrawal said Positron is working with the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada to find a suitable office/manufacturing space. The challenge, he noted, is that the company’s work requires far more power than is commonly found in typical office spaces. Positron is looking at leasing a manufacturing facility in South Meadows, Agrawal said.
“It’s a strange requirement,” he said. “Our office space requirement is average, but we need to find a place where those (high) amperages are already in place.”
Positron may be on the precipice of unprecedented growth as artificial intelligence continues to become more deeply embedded into modern technology and society, Agrawal added.
“When I look at AI ecosystems and what they are projected to do for us as human beings, whether it’s really important applications in health care and medical systems, or consumer applications like social media and gaming, it will be such a big part of our culture,” he said. “Powering and providing computation to AI will be a big business.
“We are in a great environment with the industry we are targeting, and also being in Nevada, which is friendly to big hardware product builders,” he added. “We want to be the underlying technology that is powering those various ecosystems.”
In addition to being a U.S.-based alternative, Positron's value proposition is that its products are more energy and cost efficient, Argawal said. Inertia, he added, is a primary barrier to greater acceleration of its products since technology companies often lean on what’s worked before.
“You have to give people a real good reason to change, both with economic value and ease-of-use,” Agrawal said. “But it’s also about keeping up with demand – if you can keep up, companies will keep growing with you. We have to make sure we can supply companies with the computational requirements they need – that’s the big challenge for us as we grow.”
Taylor Adams, chief executive officer of EDAWN, said Positron is another affirmation Northern Nevada has become a global destination for business expansion and relocation.
“We can do it here like no other,” Adams said. “Businesses that start here, scale here and grow here are ultimately the companies that will stay here and create a future for our economy that any city in the world would love to have.
“More and more we are finding that Northern Nevada is a place where technology is coming to scale, and that’s an incredibly powerful thing for our economy,” Adams added.