Ten years ago, betting on hardware instead of software made you the weird kid at the venture capital lunch table. Lior Susan’s Eclipse Ventures leaned into that awkwardness anyway, parking $6.5 million into Cerebras Systems, a company building massive AI chips. That stake is now worth an estimated $2.5 billion.
For those keeping score at home, that’s roughly a 385x return.
How Cerebras lit the fuse
Cerebras Systems, the AI chip company that builds wafer-scale processors designed to compete with Nvidia’s dominance in AI training hardware, went public with shares priced at $185. The stock closed its first day of trading at $311, a 68% pop that signaled just how hungry the market is for anything related to AI infrastructure.
Foundation Capital reportedly achieved a 76x return on its Cerebras investment. Benchmark, another early backer, logged a 12x return.
