Skip to main content

Exostellar

Category: AI Infrastructure

A cloud-native infrastructure platform that optimizes AI and machine learning workloads through automated resource management and proprietary live-migration technology. Exostellar was founded in 2018. The company is led by Tony Shakib. Based in Santa Clara, USA. Team size: 20-50. Total funding raised: $33.0M. Latest round: Acquisition (Apr 2024). Key investors include ["Prosperity7 Ventures","Adobe","Alpha Intelligence Capital","Bowery Capital","Cambium Capital","Celesta Capital","Redline Capital"].

Founded
2018
Headquarters
Santa Clara, USA
Team size
20-50
Total funding
$33.0M

Value proposition

Reduces cloud infrastructure costs by up to 90% by enabling stateful AI workloads to run on volatile 'spot' instances without the risk of data loss or downtime.

Products and solutions

["X-Spot: An automated management platform for cloud spot instances that prevents interruption through predictive migration.","Exo-GPU: A GPU virtualization and orchestration layer designed to maximize utilization and performance for LLM training and inference.","Live Migration Engine: A core technology that moves running containers across different cloud instances or providers with near-zero downtime.","Exostellar Resource Manager: A dashboard for real-time monitoring and automated scaling of heterogeneous cloud resources."]

Unique value

Exostellar is unique for its ability to perform 'live migration' of stateful, containerized applications across heterogeneous hardware (different CPU/GPU types) without requiring code changes.

Target customer

AI/ML developers, DevOps teams, enterprise data science departments, and cloud-native companies looking to reduce GPU/CPU spend.

Industries served

["Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning","Cloud Computing Infrastructure","Enterprise Software","Financial Services (High-frequency data processing)","Scientific Research & Academia"]

Technology advantage

The platform decouples software from the underlying hardware layer, allowing workloads to 'hop' between cloud instances in real-time to capture the lowest pricing while maintaining 100% application uptime.

How they differentiate

Exostellar differentiates through its proprietary 'live migration' technology, which allows stateful, containerized applications to move across heterogeneous hardware (different CPU/GPU types) with near-zero downtime. Unlike competitors that focus primarily on stateless workloads or simple scaling, Exostellar enables complex AI/ML workloads to run on volatile 'spot' instances without risk of data loss or interruption.

Main competitors

["Spot by NetApp (formerly Spot.io)","Cast AI","Zesty","Granulate (an Intel Company)"]

Key partnerships

["Qualcomm (Parent Company/Strategic Integration)","Cornell University (Academic and IP partner)","Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network","Microsoft Azure","Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"]

Notable customers

["Cornell University","Cloud-native AI enterprises","Enterprise Data Science Departments"]

Major milestones

["Founded in 2018 as Exotanium by Cornell University researchers","Secured $5M Seed funding in October 2020","Rebranded from Exotanium to Exostellar in 2023","Raised $15M Series A led by Prosperity7 Ventures in September 2023","Acquired by Qualcomm in April 2024 to bolster their AI software capabilities"]

Growth metrics

Estimated $4M - $6M ARR prior to acquisition; technology integrated into Qualcomm's AI Stack.

Market positioning

Deep-tech AI infrastructure specialist focused on cloud resource fluidity and GPU optimization.

Geographic focus

North America

Patents and IP

Holds exclusive licenses to foundational patents from Cornell University related to container virtualization, distributed systems, and memory-state migration (e.g., technology derived from the 'Supercloud' research project).

About Tony Shakib

Tony Shakib is a veteran technology executive with over 30 years of experience in scaling cloud, IoT, and AI infrastructure. Before joining Exostellar as CEO in 2023, he served as General Manager and Vice President of Azure IoT and Edge at Microsoft. He also spent over 20 years at Cisco in various leadership roles, including Vice President and General Manager of the IoT Vertical Solutions Engineering group, where he was instrumental in driving Cisco's networking and IoT strategy.

Official website: