Former Google and Meta executive launches AI startup Majestic Labs

Former 3 people meta and google Silicon executives announced Monday that they have raised a total of $100 million to build technology they say can reduce cloud companies’ spending on building data centers.

The startup, called Majestic Labs, is co-founded by Ofer Shacham, Sha Rabii, and Masumi Reynders, all of whom have spent years developing major silicon products together at Meta and Google. Majestic’s patent-pending silicon design architecture has 1,000 times more memory than a typical enterprise-grade server, co-founders told CNBC.

Majestic develops the entire chip system. Nvidiabut each of the startup’s servers could replace up to 10 of today’s leading racks, they said.

The company closed a $71 million Series A funding round led by Bow Wave Capital in September. Other investors include Lux Capital. Prior to Monday’s announcement, the co-founders had been quietly working on the startup since late 2023.

Majestic’s funding announcement comes as major tech companies increase capital spending, primarily for data center infrastructure. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon each raised their guidance on capital spending in October, and together expect the numbers to reach more than $380 billion this year.

The majority of large-scale language models and AI workloads rely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), but more companies are moving into this space. Last week, Google announced its latest tensor processing unit (TPU), Ironwood. Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic plans to use it in its Claude model.

But memory capacity remains a challenge for companies processing large amounts of data, something Majestic’s co-founders said they wanted to address.

“Nvidia makes great GPUs and has driven incredible AI innovation,” Majestic CEO Shacham told CNBC. “We’re not trying to completely replace GPUs; we’re solving memory-intensive AI workloads that are constrained by a fixed compute-to-memory ratio.”

Majestic is targeting hyperscalers and large enterprises running AI models, including the financial and pharmaceutical industries, co-founders said.

The technology behind the company includes a patent-pending architecture that allows Majestic to consolidate multiple racks’ worth of traditional equipment and memory onto a single server. Majestic claims this results in a smaller footprint and requires less power and cooling, helping reduce data center costs for its customers.

Majestic’s box server prototype is expected to be available to some customers in 2027, and the startup has already begun discussions about pre-orders, co-founders said. Majestic declined to share its customers.

The company has fewer than 50 employees, half of whom are based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the remainder in Los Altos, California. Majestic said it plans to expand its locations over the next year and seek additional funding.

The three met at Google, and together they helped start a team working on Google’s TPUs.

“We were building AI for DARPA, Google, Meta, and suddenly AI became a ubiquitous thing that everyone needed,” Shacham said. “Every big company needs AI. For me, it was a good opportunity to say, ‘Why not do that?'”

Reynders first joined the search company in 2003, when he joined Google as senior general counsel. She is currently Majestic’s COO and manages the business side of the company.

At Google, her team focused on silicon-focused business development and product strategy. Reynders spent 15 years at Google, where he rose to director of product management and silicon.

Majestic’s president, Rabii, earned a PhD from Stanford University and sold his last chip design company, Arda Technologies, to Google in 2011, where he was promoted to senior director of engineering. Under Rabii, Google launched Argos, a video chip used in YouTube’s data centers.

Mr. Shacham sold his company, Chip Genesis, to Google in August 2013, when Mr. Rabii was leading Google’s silicon team. Chip Genesis’ technology is widely used in many products, including the AI ​​accelerator in Google’s Pixel smartphones. At Google, Shacham was promoted to head of silicon design and implementation for consumer hardware.

The three left Google in 2018 and moved to the company then known as Facebook. So they created the Facebook Agile Silicon team, known as “FAST,” within the company’s Reality Labs hardware division. Shacham has been promoted to vice president and head of FAST.

When Meta laid off Reality Lab employees in 2023, Shacham had to implement layoffs, he said. At that point, Mehta was trying to conserve cash, he said.

“Part of that was reductions across the organization, and FAST was not excluded from that,” Shacham said. “This isn’t a good place to be, and it doesn’t feel good to do it.”

The trio founded Majestic Labs after brainstorming the biggest bottleneck problems in silicon and AI.

“We’ve been friends and colleagues for a long time, so the concept of working together and doing something exciting was always on the periphery,” Reinders said.

Majestic is looking to grow and hire in 2026, and its co-founders said they are leveraging a rolodex of more than 1,500 employees who have worked together at previous companies including Meta and Google.

“They already have confidence in us,” Rabie said of his former colleagues.

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