Former Google, Meta Execs Launch AI Startup Majestic Labs

A trio of former Meta and Google silicon executives have announced the launch of Majestic Labs, a startup poised to disrupt the cloud computing landscape. Backed by $100 million in funding, Majestic Labs aims to significantly reduce data center buildout costs for cloud providers by leveraging a novel silicon design architecture. The founders, Ofer Shacham, Sha Rabii, and Masumi Reynders, bring a wealth of experience from their previous roles leading silicon product development at Meta and Google.

Majestic Labs distinguishes itself by developing its entire chip system, taking a similar vertically integrated approach as Nvidia. However, the key innovation lies in its memory capacity. The company claims its patent-pending design boasts 1,000 times the memory of a typical enterprise-grade server. This density allows a single Majestic server to potentially replace up to ten traditional racks, drastically shrinking the physical footprint required for compute-intensive workloads.

The company’s $71 million Series A funding round, led by Bow Wave Capital in September, signals strong investor confidence in Majestic’s vision. Lux Capital is also among its investors. The startup has been operating under the radar since late 2023, fine-tuning its technology.

This announcement arrives at a crucial juncture, as major tech companies are scaling up their capital expenditure plans, primarily driven by the escalating demands of data center infrastructure. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively project their capital expenditures to exceed $380 billion this year, reflecting the intense competition and infrastructure build-out required to support the growing demand for AI and cloud services. These companies face increased pressure to optimize their data center spending, highlighting the potential market that Majestic Labs is tapping into. Industry analysts note that a significant portion of this capital expenditure is allocated towards advanced computing hardware and networking infrastructure required for AI model training and deployment.

While GPUs, particularly those from Nvidia, have become the de facto standard for many large language models (LLMs) and AI workloads, the field is rapidly diversifying. Google recently unveiled its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), “Ironwood,” designed to compete directly with Nvidia’s offerings. AI startup Anthropic plans to utilize Ironwood for its Claude model, showcasing the increasing demand for specialized AI hardware. As AI models grow in complexity and dataset sizes explode, memory capacity becomes a critical bottleneck. This is precisely the problem Majestic Labs aims to solve.

“Nvidia makes excellent GPUs and has driven incredible AI innovation,” says Shacham, CEO of Majestic Labs. “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.” This highlights the startup’s focus on a niche within the broader AI market – applications hampered by memory limitations.

Majestic Labs is targeting hyperscalers and large enterprises that deploy AI models, including those in the financial and pharmaceutical sectors. These industries are particularly data-intensive, requiring massive memory capacity to process and analyze complex information.

The company’s core technology revolves around patent-pending architectures designed to consolidate the functionality of multiple racks of conventional equipment and memory into a single server unit. Majestic asserts that this approach will shrink data center footprints, cut power consumption, and reduce cooling requirements, ultimately lowering operational costs for its clients and improving power usage effectiveness (PUE).

Prototypes of Majestic’s servers are slated to be available for select customers in 2027, with pre-order discussions already underway. Majestic declined to disclose its client list, citing confidentiality agreements. The company currently employs fewer than 50 individuals, split between Tel Aviv, Israel, and Los Altos, California. Majestic plans to expand its workforce in both locations and pursue further funding in the coming year. This measured growth strategy suggests a focus on sustainable development and strong execution capabilities.

The three co-founders first crossed paths at Google and were instrumental in establishing the team responsible for developing 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?'”

Reynders was the first to join Google in 2003, serving as a senior corporate counsel. Now the COO of Majestic, she oversees the company’s business operations. During her 15-year tenure at Google, Reynders held positions in business development and product strategy related to silicon, eventually rising to director of product management for silicon.

Rabii, Majestic’s president, earned a doctorate from Stanford University. In 2011, he sold his chip design company, Arda Technologies, to Google, where he advanced to the role of senior director of engineering. Under Rabii’s leadership, Google launched its video chip Argos, which is deployed in YouTube’s data centers.

Shacham sold his prior company, Chip Genesis, to Google in August 2013, with Rabii leading Google’s silicon team. Chip Genesis’s technology found widespread application within Google products, including the AI accelerators used in Pixel smartphones. Shacham eventually became the head of silicon design and implementation for consumer hardware at Google.

In 2018, the trio left Google for what was then known as Facebook, creating the Facebook Agile Silicon Team (FAST) within the company’s Reality Labs hardware division. Shacham ultimately served as vice president and head of FAST.

Shacham recalls having to implement layoffs within FAST in 2023, as Meta sought to improve cost controls. This experience underscored the importance of financial sustainability and strategic alignment in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

“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.”

Majestic Labs was founded after the three discussed the most pressing bottlenecks in 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 anticipates growth and hiring in 2026, the co-founders intend to leverage their combined network of over 1,500 former colleagues from Meta and Google. This established network offers a competitive advantage in attracting top talent and accelerating the company’s growth trajectory.

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