That's pretty awesome that you guys backed a semiconductor company. I didn't apply as I was skeptical you would invest in one... great to see YC expanding so far and fast though.

We're looking at having full simulation capabilities (with physical verification in progress) come the end of this year, with a shuttle run (prototype) tape out in Q1 next year. It's about a 3 month turn around, so we are expecting to have our first 100 prototype chips in the ~May-June timeframe next year. From there, we'll be putting together 20-25 evaluation units (consisting of 4 of our chips put together), and selling those... we have 4 order commitments already, which almost cover the cost of getting the prototypes made (though we are not reliant on that, as we now have outside funding). We'll be using TSMC (the largest pure-play semi foundry) and their 28nm process (with the very slim possibility of going down to 16/20nm if the price is right at that point).

Right now, our connections are primarily in academia and government, so they are the people we have talked to the most and have said they will put money up, and we do have some government grant funding. I do not want government and academia to be our primary focus though (Any thoughts on that?), although early non dilutive funding is nice. For the applications we have specced out that they care about, we are showing around a 10x efficiency increase for dense matrix applications (over top of the line CPUs and GPUs currently used), and even enabling some applications that were not really practical on existing systems. I can't go into too much detail on those publicly, but can talk about them offline.

When it comes to our best application space, and what I would like to target, is the signal processing and mobile basestation space. Our best performance and efficiency (25x the best CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs at the moment) comes with FFTs, and we're capable of doing next generation large FFTs better than the best DSPs are at doing the current generation types. The few people (mostly academics in the field) I have talked to in this think this is a big game changer for that industry, and the problem we have is that we don't really have any connections in the industry itself. My idea has been we should try to build up as much evidence before talking to more people in it.

While I have talked about two areas, our architecture isn't really limited to any one, it just performs exceptionally well for those... but planning for wider market adoption is I think too far ahead of us at this point.

With our current funding, we'll be able to get through making 100 (16 core) prototype chips, build those into evaluation units, and test them with customers... from there, doing a full tape out and getting the full 256 core chip to market will be another $10 to $15 million, and we expect to be able to tape out and go into mass production in the first half of 2017.

Question: Do you think the Thiel-style monopoly approach would work in our case? I initially imagined we would be able to enter and do very well in the High Performance/Supercomputing area, eat up market share from the big guys (Intel, NVIDIA, etc) who don't care about the "small" HPC market. From there, expand to large business data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) and mobile basestation systems, and so on until we hit mass market devices. Do you think this is a decent (although very simply described for brevity) plan for the 3 to 5 year timeframe?