Former Google, Meta execs form AI startup Majestic Labs

Three former Meta and Google silicon executives on Monday announced they’ve raised a total of $100 million to build technology they say will reduce cloud companies’ spend on data center buildouts.

Called Majestic Labs, the startup’s co-founders are Ofer Shacham, Sha Rabii and Masumi Reynders, all of whom spent years working together leading silicon products at Meta and Google. Majestic’s patent-pending silicon design architecture includes 1,000 times the memory of a typical enterprise-grade server, the co-founders told CNBC.

Majestic develops its entire chip system, much like Nvidia, but each of the startup’s servers may replace up to 10 of today’s leading racks, they said.

The company closed its $71 million Series A funding round in September, led by Bow Wave Capital. Among its others investors is 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 raise their capital expenditures, primarily for data center infrastructure. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon each lifted their guidance for capital expenditures in October, and they collectively expect that number to reach more than $380 billion this year.

While the majority of large language models and AI workloads have relied on Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, more companies are entering the fold. Google last week announced Ironwood, its latest tensor processing unit, or TPUs, which artificial intelligence startup Anthropic plans to use for its Claude model.

However, memory capacity remains a challenge for companies that have large amounts of data to process, which the Majestic co-founders said they hope to address.

“Nvidia makes excellent GPUs and has driven incredible AI innovation,” Shacham, Majestic’s CEO, told CNBC. “We’re not trying to replace GPUs across the board — we’re solving for memory-intensive AI workloads where the fixed compute-to-memory ratio becomes a constraint”

Majestic is going after hyperscalers and large companies that run AI models, including those from the financial and pharmaceutical industries, the co-founders said.

The technology underpinning the company includes patent-pending architectures that allow Majestic to collapse multiple racks worth of conventional equipment and memory into a single server. Majestic claims that will allow for a smaller footprint and requires less power and cooling, helping the company’s clients reduce their data center costs.

Prototypes of Majestic’s box servers will be available for some customers in 2027, and the startup has already begun discussing pre-orders, the co-founders said. Majestic declined to share its clients.

The company has fewer than 50 employees — half of which are based in Tel Aviv, Israel, while the rest are based in Los Altos, California. Majestic said it plans to grow each location and seek additional funding in the coming year. 

The trio met at Google, and together, they helped stand up the team working on Google’s TPUs.

“We’d been building AI for DARPA, for Google, for Meta, but suddenly AI became this ubiquitous thing that everybody needs,” Shacham said. “Every large company needs AI, and that was a good time for me to say ‘How about we go and do that?'”

The first to join the search company was Reynders in 2003, who went to Google as a senior corporate counsel. She’s now Majestic’s COO and manages the business side of the company.

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

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

Shacham sold his company, Chip Genesis, to Google in August 2013, when Rabii was leading Google’s silicon team. Chip Genesis’s technology was used broadly across many products including the AI accelerators in Google’s Pixel smartphones. At Google, Shacham rose to head of silicon design and implementation for consumer hardware.

The three of them left Google in 2018 for the company then known as Facebook. There, they built the Facebook Agile Silicon Team, known as “FAST,” within the company’s Reality Labs hardware division. Shacham rose to vice president and head of FAST.

When Meta laid off employees from Reality Labs in 2023, Shacham had to conduct the cuts, he said. At that point, Meta was trying to conserve cash, he said.

“Part of that was layoffs across the organization, and FAST was not excluded from that,” Shacham said. “It’s not a good place to be, not a good feeling to do.”

The three founded Majestic Labs after brainstorming about the biggest bottleneck problems for silicon and AI.

“We’ve been friends and colleagues for a long time, so this notion of working together and doing something exciting has always been in the periphery,” Reynders said.

As Majestic eyes growth and hiring in 2026, the co-founders said they’re tapping into their collective of rolodex of the more than 1,500 employees they’ve worked with at prior companies, including Meta and Google.

“There’s that trust they already have with us,” Rabii said of the former colleagues.

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