Substrate / Company

Company

Everyone is building models. We build the ground they stand on.

The last decade of software ran on cloud infrastructure nobody thinks about. The next decade of AI needs the same thing, and that is the only thing we build.


Why we exist

Infrastructure is a discipline, not a feature.

We started Substrate because the teams shipping the most interesting AI were spending most of their time not on AI, but on GPUs, kernels, and capacity. That work is real, and it is hard, and it should be somebody's whole company. It is ours.

We don't ship a model. We don't compete with your product. We do one unglamorous thing exceptionally well, and we intend to be the reason your inference just works, quietly, for a very long time.

Dr. Renn Okafor, founder and CEO of Substrate, in the company's San Jose office.
2022
founded, San Jose
64
engineers & researchers
12
regions online
$140M
raised to date
How we operate

Buttoned-up, on purpose.

Principle

Latency is a promise

A number on a slide is marketing. A number in production is a promise. We publish the ones we keep.

Principle

Boring is a feature

Infrastructure earns trust by not surprising you. We optimize for the absence of incidents, not the presence of headlines.

Principle

Own the hard layer

We build our own silicon and run our own fleet because the savings and the speed live there. Not in a wrapper.

Leadership

Two decades of shipping infrastructure.

Founder & CEO

Dr. Renn Okafor

Built inference systems at hyperscale before founding Substrate. Believes the best infrastructure is invisible.

Head of Silicon

Mara Sølvberg

Twelve years designing accelerators. Leads the team that makes the chip do one thing perfectly.

Head of Platform

Ilya Berestov

Ran reliability for a top-five cloud. Measures success in incidents that never happened.

Build the layer AI runs on.

We're hiring engineers who think infrastructure is the interesting part.