Tiny Corp
Category: AI Infrastructure
AI infrastructure company building open-source deep learning (tinygrad), AI hardware (tinybox V2), AI governance (Conduit), and Apple ecosystem tools (TinyGPU) to commoditize AI compute and enable trustworthy autonomy. Tiny Corp was founded in 2022. The company is led by George Hotz. Based in San Diego, California, United States. Team size: 11-50. Total funding raised: $5.1M. Latest round: Seed. Key investors include Undisclosed (described by George Hotz as "an amazing set of investors who are aligned with real value creation").
- Founded
- 2022
- Headquarters
- San Diego, California, United States
- Team size
- 11-50
- Total funding
- $5.1M
Value proposition
Commoditize the petaflop by building open-source AI software (tinygrad), affordable AI hardware (tinybox V2), AI governance infrastructure (Conduit), and Apple ecosystem enablement (TinyGPU) — offering superior performance-per-dollar and trustworthy autonomy for enterprise AI adoption.
Products and solutions
tinygrad (open-source deep learning framework), tinybox V2 (AI workstation: Red V2 with 4x AMD Radeon 9070XT at $12K; Green V2 Blackwell with 4x RTX PRO 6000 at $65K), Conduit (AI governance product for agent control), TinyGPU (Apple-approved eGPU driver for Apple Silicon Macs)
Unique value
Only company combining a minimalist, RISC-like open-source ML framework (tinygrad) with purpose-built AI hardware (tinybox) that targets AMD consumer GPUs for AI workloads, offering dramatically better price-performance than NVIDIA enterprise solutions.
Target customer
AI developers, ML researchers, startups, and enterprises needing local/on-premise AI compute for training and inference; the "GPU middle class" who cannot afford NVIDIA enterprise hardware.
Industries served
AI/ML Infrastructure, Autonomous Driving (via comma.ai relationship), Enterprise AI
Technology advantage
tinygrad's minimalist IR (12 operations, all ADD/MUL only) enables aggressive op fusion and optimization that Turing-complete frameworks like CUDA/PyTorch cannot match. Lazy evaluation for automatic kernel fusion. Custom AMD GPU driver stack replacing ROCm/HIP. Open-source MIT license. Building software-first approach to eventually design custom AI chips.
How they differentiate
Unlike other AI hardware startups (Cerebras, Groq, Graphcore) that taped out custom chips first, Tiny Corp starts with software (tinygrad) on off-the-shelf AMD GPUs, proving the software stack before silicon. Open-source framework vs proprietary CUDA ecosystem. Focus on consumer AMD GPUs as affordable AI compute. "Android to NVIDIA's Apple" positioning.
Main competitors
NVIDIA (CUDA ecosystem, H100/B200 GPUs), AMD (ROCm software stack), PyTorch (Meta's ML framework), Modular (Mojo language), Groq (LPU inference chips)
Key partnerships
AMD (GPU hardware partnership for RDNA3/RDNA5 enablement, custom driver development; AMD shipped MI300X to Tiny Corp), Apple (TinyGPU driver extension approved for Apple Silicon Macs), OpenRouter (token-selling compute marketplace)
Notable customers
comma.ai (sister company, uses tinygrad for openpilot inference), 583+ preorders for tinybox as of early 2024
Major milestones
Oct 2020: George Hotz starts tinygrad as a side project, Nov 2022: Tiny Corp founded, May 2023: Raised $5.1M seed round, 2024: Launched original tinybox with 6x GPUs, 2025: Announced Exabox ($10M supercomputer), Mar 2026: Launched tinybox V2 lineup ($12K-$65K), Mar 2026: Apple approved TinyGPU driver for Apple Silicon Mac eGPU support, 2026: Launched Conduit AI governance product, Website rebranded to tinycorp focusing on trustworthy AI infrastructure
Growth metrics
tinygrad has 33.3K+ GitHub stars; tinybox V2 launched Mar 2026 starting at $12K; TinyGPU driver approved by Apple Mar 2026; 22+ GitHub repositories
Market positioning
Disruptor positioning as the open-source, AMD-friendly alternative to NVIDIA's closed AI compute stack. Targets the "GPU middle class" — users priced out of NVIDIA enterprise hardware. Building in public with strong developer community (33.3K+ GitHub stars on tinygrad). Expanded into AI governance with Conduit and Apple ecosystem with TinyGPU driver.
Geographic focus
Global (US-headquartered, San Diego-based)
About George Hotz
Ex-Founder/CEO of comma.ai (self-driving startup); Ex-Facebook engineer; Ex-Google Project Zero; Ex-Vicarious; Ex-Twitter intern. First to jailbreak iPhone (2007) and PlayStation 3. Studied at Carnegie Mellon University (AI PhD program, dropped out).
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Official website: https://tinycorp.io/
