About Us

Grok: to understand profoundly and intuitively

­— Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Groq

Groq was founded in 2016 and our name was officially trademarked in the same year.

If you’ve heard the rumor our inception started pool-side, you heard correctly! All those years ago, we were the first to go by Groq (more on that here) and were born with the vision of making AI accessible for all.

Groq is based in Mountain View, CA with Groqsters (what we call our teammates) worldwide. While we have brick-and-mortar locations, we’re everywhere from San Diego to Austin to New York City,  with concentrations of Groqsters in Silicon Valley, Toronto, Liberty Lake, and London.

To make the best technology, we hire the best people. At Groq, we’re proud of our talent density – the concentration of exceptional individuals who come together as a team to collaborate, solve problems, and innovate together. If you’re interested in joining us, check out our open positions.

FEDERAL ADVISORY BOARD

Karen Evans

Karen Evans

Milo Medi

Milo Medin

Don Simard

Don Simard

Teresa Smetzer

Teresa Smetzer

Jacqueline Tame

Jacqueline Tame

Pete Tseronis

Pete Tseronis

Investors

Partners

GroqCard™ accelerators are available through Bittware. Learn more here.

IQT matches strategic investment with game changing technology to enhance and advance national security for the U.S. and its allies.

Groq is a featured inference provider for poe.com, hosting Llama 2 70B and Mixtral 8x7b running on the LPU™ Inference Engine.

Cirrascale is a premier cloud services provider of deep learning infrastructure solutions for Natural Language Processing and other deep learning workflows. 

Vapi is a platform to build, test and deploy voicebots in minutes rather than months. Groq is one of the inference providers powering Vapi and its real-time voice assistance.  

Groq offers a number of paths to partnership including:

  • IHVs: Independent Hardware Vendors for collaboration in providing servers and racks tailored to various specifications and customer requirements
  • ISVs: Independent Software Vendors can access the Groq platform via our API. Groq is ideal for ISVs providing NLP and NLU-based solutions. For ISVs building SaaS and/or PaaS solutions, hardware procurement is available.
  • CSPs: Cloud Service Providers looking to provide inference as a service, or host AI applications such as translation, sentiment analysis, code generation, content generation, chatbot applications, and contact center solutions can benefit from our 10x better latency advantage.
  • VARs: We partner with industry-leading distributors and value-added resellers to offer our AI solutions to end customers, leveraging their existing billing and relationship management capabilities.
  • Consulting: We bring on consulting partners to deliver tailor-made solutions to end customers. Consulting partners have procurement vehicles and relationships with enterprises and Public Sector entities, providing strategic, operational, and IT consulting. You can join us to build innovative solutions for our customers on top of the Groq inference engine.

Please fill out the following form if you are interested in becoming a Groq partner or learning more about our Partner Network.

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Jonathan Ross

CEO, Founder

Jonathan Ross is the CEO and founder of Groq Inc. Groq is the creator of the world’s first Language Processing Unit (LPU), providing exceptional speed performance for AI workloads running on their LPU™ Inference Engine.

Prior to founding Groq, Jonathan began what became Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first-generation TPU chip. Jonathan next joined Google X’s Rapid Eval Team, the initial stage of the famed “Moonshots factory”, where he devised and incubated new Bets (Units) for Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Adam Tachner

CLO & VP of Corporate Development

For nearly 20 years, Adam Tachner has provided high-growth semiconductor companies with the cross-functional business leadership they need to thrive in competitive markets. As head of the legal and compliance functions at Atheros Communications (acquired 2011 by Qualcomm for $3.6B), Adam supported the company’s rapid growth from a pre-revenue innovator to a market-leading IPO and a $1B annual revenue run rate. Later, he helped integrate Atheros into Qualcomm’s global operations. Most recently, Adam held both VP Corporate Development and General Counsel roles at Google’s Access division, and earlier at fabless MEMS leader InvenSense, now the sensor division of TDK.
Estelle Hong -- Chief of Staff to CEO & Head of Strategic Operations copy
Estelle Hong

Head, Planning & Execution (PLEX)

Estelle is a jack-of-all-trades by day, and a National Guardsman by night, bringing more than a decade of leadership experience from the Army and Intel Corporation. Estelle graduated from West Point with an Engineering Management degree and was commissioned as an Engineer Officer. Later, she received her MBA at Cornell University and joined Intel’s Accelerated Leadership Program, driving results in business HR, retail analytics, and the memory business. Estelle’s passion for driving disruptive technology and working with incredibly smart people aligns nicely in her opportunity to help scale Groq become an iconic company. Outside of work, she likes to snowboard, travel, play guitar, or hang out with her friends in San Francisco.
Tobi Crabtree -- Director of People & Culture copy
Tobi Crabtree

VP of People & Culture

Tobi Crabtree brings over 15 years of human resource and leadership experience in diverse companies spanning Fortune 500s to non-profits. Prior to joining Groq, Tobi was the Director of Global Employee Services at Intel where she was responsible for leading a global organization that provided exceptional support to over 100K employees, leveraging data to drive program and culture change and leadership development. Tobi’s passion for people and culture shows through her track record of improving the employee experience, making data-driven decisions, and steering organizational evolution. Tobi earned an EMBA from the University of Washington and received a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from UCLA.
Mark Heaps

VP of Brand & Creative

Mark Heaps is the VP of Brand & Creative at Groq, where he leads a diverse team focused on innovative AI solutions with demo applications enabled by Groq LPU™ systems. Mark is a longtime technology evangelist who has worked with Adobe, Google, Apple and others on various projects ranging from digital imaging to AI systems used in some of the most popular applications today. He is passionate about democratizing AI in service of advancing human societies and loves exploring how the next generation of technology end-users will interact with LLMs. Mark believes that every human is destined to become a future prompt-designer.
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Aileen Black

President, Government & Public Sector

Aileen Black is a highly respected IT industry executive and general manager with a dynamic record of driving exponential growth results in public sector organizations. Her unique pedigree includes developing industry-changing technology and service businesses from the ground up, with proven experience in running large enterprise-class business units in excess of 600 million. Black has held executive positions at Google, VMware, EMC, and Oracle. With more than 30 years of experience building, managing, and motivating top-notch technology sales and professional services organizations, she has proven success with a deep understanding of the cloud, artificial intelligence, enterprise open source, big data, government contracting, sales, strategic alliances, marketing and the political landscape across the public sector market in addition to extensive media and public speaking across all forms of media including radio and television.
Sheryl Savage
Sheryl Savage

General Counsel

Sheryl joined Groq with the intention to transform how customers interact with in-house legal departments. With over 19 years of legal experience, she has worked in a wide range of fields, from Fortune 100 technology companies to newly acquired renewable energy firms. While her training and experience was influenced by larger, traditional in-house legal departments, Sheryl believes the legal team should be everything but traditional.  Instead of approaching the law as slow-moving, immutable and resistant to change, Sheryl embraces technology and innovation so Groq can do what it does best – defy gravity. 

Outside of the office, Sheryl is a member of the Women’s General Counsel Network, a mentor and advocate for women lawyers, novice rock climber, avid cyclist, and hiker.

JIm Miller
Jim Miller

VP, Hardware Engineering

Jim Miller is the Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Groq, responsible for leading the silicon and systems engineering teams. He has spent his career delivering some of the most complex and impactful semiconductors and platforms. He began his career at Intel with early engineering and management roles on the i486 and Pentium, and led all of the Pentium II engineering.  After Intel, he served as VP of Engineering at VOIP pioneer, Silicon Spice, led all of Cadence’s EDA product development, drove methodology convergence at AMD, led the engineering efforts for Broadcom’s, and then Qualcomm’s, ARM server SOCs, platforms, and software. Most recently, he was at Amazon responsible for the hardware development, delivery, and support for AWS’ compute platforms. Jim graduated from Stanford University with both a BSEE and MSEE, and Santa Clara University with an MBA. 

John Barrus
John Barrus

VP of Product

Barrus recently rejoined Groq after launching the Amazon Cardinal warehouse robot. An accomplished, high-tech leader, Barrus uses his deep technical background to drive the creation of new commercial products, including chips and handheld devices, room-size robotic workcells, and cloud accelerator infrastructure. Prior to joining Groq, Barrus led the launch of Google Cloud GPUs and TPUs, products that contribute significantly to Google’s $9B IaaS revenue. Educated at M.I.T., Barrus was the Director of the Ricoh Innovations Silicon Valley lab, has published 25 technical papers and journal articles, and has more than 80 issued U.S. patents. He is the founder of several startups and new business divisions.
Andy-Rappaport---Board-Member
Andy Rappaport

Board Member

Andy Rappaport is Managing Partner of Skyline Public Works, Chief Investment Officer of SPW Investments, and Treasurer of the Rappaport Family Foundation. He has spent more than 35 years founding, investing in, and guiding scores of transformative start-up companies. From 1996 until starting his retirement in 2012, Andy was an active partner at August Capital, a leading technology venture capital firm, which he helped grow from $100M to more than $2B under management. Prior to joining August, Andy ran The Technology Research Group, a Boston-based global strategy consulting firm he founded in 1984. Andy is a noted authority on the business and economic implications of changing technologies and has written and spoken extensively on the topic. Technology companies Andy co-founded, led investments in, and/or served as a board member of including Actel, Atheros Communications, Luxtera, MMC Networks, Silicon Architects, Olema Oncology, Silicon Image, and Transmeta. Andy and his wife Deborah are active philanthropists, focusing primarily on causes of equity and social justice. They are the founders of the Minnesota Street Project (www.minnesotastreetproject.com), a 120,000 square foot multi-building arts campus in San Francisco founded to provide an affordable, vibrant hub for the visual arts in an otherwise unaffordable city. Andy is also an active musician, and video and sound artist. He and Deborah split their time between San Francisco and Martha’s Vineyard.
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Jay Zaveri

Board Member

Jay Zaveri is a partner at Social Capital, a top decile investment firm in Silicon Valley. Jay makes concentrated investments in companies solving forty of the world’s hardest problems by 2045. Key investments include Swarm, Aclima, Syapse, UrbanFootprint, DroneSeed, Saildrone, Relativity, Ashvattha, Journal and Datacoral. Prior to joining Social Capital, Jay has been a successful technology entrepreneur. He co-founded three technology companies, the most recent of which was mobile productivity application CloudOn, which had ten million enterprise users and was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. Jay has built companies, products and platforms that have scaled to millions of active users in consumer, mobile and enterprise software. His love for cartoons and work in the new media tech space has won him 18 awards, including a Hollywood Film Festival for Best Animated Short.
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Dr. Ford Tamer

Board Member

Dr. Ford Tamer served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Inphi for nine years until its recent $10B+ merger with Marvell. Under Dr. Tamer’s stewardship, Inphi became the trusted market leader for electro-optics solutions for cloud and telecom operators, increasing revenue from these customers more than 20 times during his tenure, to an annual run rate of about $750 million.

Prior to Inphi, Dr. Tamer served as CEO of Telegent Systems. Before this, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom’s Infrastructure Networking Group, which he grew five-fold to $1.2 billion in revenue within five years, making that business the uncontested leader in infrastructure silicon solutions. He also served as co-founder and CEO of Agere Inc., which pioneered Network Processors (now at Intel as the Ixia product line). After Agere was acquired by Lucent Microelectronics, Dr. Tamer became Vice President at Agere Systems, a spin-off from Lucent. Earlier in his career, Dr. Tamer co-founded, operated, and assisted in the growth of system management software, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy businesses. He serves on the Boards of Directors of Marvell, Teradyne, and Sentons. Dr. Tamer holds a MS and Ph.D. from MIT.

Youngme Moon

Board Member

Youngme Moon is the Donald K. Douglas Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, where her research sits at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and marketing. A renowned branding and marketing strategist, she is the author of the bestselling book, Different, and has sold more than two million case studies on companies sprawling the digital economy. She has spent more than a decade advising, investing in, and guiding fledgling companies with disruptive potential. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Mastercard, Unilever, Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, Shoop, Basic.Space, and others. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, and her B.A. from Yale. Prior to joining HBS, she was on the faculty of MIT.

Igor Arsovski

Chief Architect & Fellow

Igor joins Groq as a fellow and is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) implementation, expert. Previously at Google, Igor was responsible for the SoC technology strategy for Google Cloud, leading the custom physical design effort for the TPU. Prior to Google, Igor was CTO of the IBM/GF/Marvell ASIC Business Unit, responsible for setting ASIC strategy for a 900+ person team, and personally optimizing 500+ of today’s best-known enterprise networking and machine learning ASICs.

Igor is an IBM Master Inventor with over 100 patents, 30 IEEE papers and presentations at premier system (AI HW Summit, Linley Conference, ML and AI Dev Com) and circuit (ISSCC, VLSI, CICC, ECTC) conferences, and currently serves on the VLSI Technology Program Committee.

Satnam Singh
Satnam Singh

Groq Fellow

Satnam Singh has worked at the intersection of programming languages and hardware design with a focus on improving developer productivity and expressive power as well as formal correctness. He has applied functional programming languages to the development of domain specific languages, both for the design and implementation of special purpose hardware accelerators and for the programs that run on these accelerators.

Satnam started his career as an academic at the University of Glasgow researching software tools and applications for FPGA-based accelerators. At Xilinx Satnam developed the Haskell-based functional domain specific language Lava for layout aware high performance circuits, as well as techniques for the formal verification of hardware. At Microsoft Satnam widened the scope of high level hardware synthesis tools to include .NET languages like C# and F# as well as improving tooling for the parallel execution of functional programs. At Google Satnam worked on various aspects of devops including Kubernetes as well as on a chip for machine learning developed using functional programming language technology. At Facebook Satnam worked on the bytecode optimization of Android applications.

Satnam is a Senior Member of the ACM and the IEEE; serves on IFIP working groups WG2.8 and WG2.11; and was previously an elected executive committee member of ACM SIGPLAN.

Tony Watson
Tony Watson

Chief Information Security Officer

Paul (Tony) Watson is the Chief Information Security Officer at Groq, bringing extensive experience from previous security roles at Google, Rockwell, Verisign, CapitalOne, Iridium, and the U.S. Air Force. With 30 years experience in the field, Paul has a robust skill set that includes information security, network security, systems security, infrastructure security, software engineering, building for scale, and more.

Paul joined Groq from Google after 17 years driving network and systems security improvements, fending off nation-State attacks, designing and developing patented cross-platform network security infrastructure, as well as building and leading high-performing security teams.

Outside of work, Paul enjoys recreational flying, downhill skiing, scuba diving, and mentoring the next generation of cybersecurity and entrepreneurial professionals.