EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.
In the words of our judges
”Astera Labs is shaping the architecture of the AI era. Jitendra, Sanjay and Casey took their garage startup and propelled it seven years later into a transformative portfolio of purpose-built silicon hardware and software solutions. They’re pushing boundaries by cultivating top-tier talent, expanding into strategic markets, delivering robust financial performance and serving as a key supplier to major hyperscalers and the broader data center ecosystem. Astera is setting the pace of innovation, with a vision and velocity that puts them head and shoulders above the competition.”
As AI reshapes the business world, dozens of companies are racing to build the infrastructure necessary to sustain its transformative potential. Amid the scramble to capitalize on massive investments in advanced systems and data management, Astera Labs is carving out a niche as a leader in providing connectivity solutions for this rapidly evolving field.
Astera cofounders Jitendra Mohan, Sanjay Gajendra and Casey Morrison recognized that to unlock the full potential of AI, the data centers powering the technology would need to be better connected. When one AI agent connects to another, a substantial number of graphics processing units (GPUs) come alive in the background to handle parallel tasks. “We enable these GPUs to talk to one another with incredible reliability at tremendous speed,” Mohan says.
Morrison notes that the trio, who met at Texas Instruments before forming Astera, saw a tremendous gap in the market for connectivity solutions to support the growing demands of AI workloads. They embarked on a venture enabling the data centers that serve as the expanding AI ecosystem’s nervous system to scale and use computer resources more efficiently. Venture capitalists found their pitch so compelling, the cofounders received their first check within five minutes of their presentation.
With the demand for AI capabilities surging, most startups have focused on developing AI accelerators. In contrast, Astera has addressed the unique challenges encountered by hyper-scalers and large-scale cloud service providers. Equipped with embedded software, Astera’s hardware solutions provide greater data center observability, enabling hyper-scalers to use predictive analytics for proactive maintenance, optimize resource usage and maximize performance.
Building on its early success, Astera instituted rigorous hiring practices to find individuals who possess the necessary skills and align with the company’s values and culture, eventually hiring only 2% of the candidates they interview. Astera’s growth strategy also allocates significant resources to R&D, enabling the company’s engineers to “write the technology that will be pivotal to the lifestyle of the future,” says Gajendra.
Over the past seven years, the company has positioned itself as a global leader in purpose-built connectivity solutions, propelling Astera closer to its goal of becoming “one of the iconic companies in the AI era, one that continues to thrive and grow 10, 15 or 30 years from now,” says Mohan.