Axel Kloth — extended biography

Axel is a physicist and computer scientist by training, and he is the Founder, President and CEO of Abacus Semiconductor Corporation. He was also the Founder and CTO of an AI-enhanced security processor company, for which he developed the underlying technology and was instrumental in the fundraising of around $20M in two rounds. He is a serial entrepreneur with a keen sense of technology and its business potential. Prior to founding the AI-enhanced security processor company as a spinout, he started SSRLabs (Scalable Systems Research Labs) with a focus on HPC, and Parimics, a vision processor and systems company that in 2004 built the foundation of real-time object detection, motion analysis and object tracking in hardware, with as many objects trackable as there were in the frame set. Parimics in 2004 was the first company to use a convolutional neural network processor for object detection, and a second processor with matrix, tensor and transform math acceleration for linear and non-linear object tracking and path prediction. All of those technologies are today considered the gold standard for AI and ML. Among about 40 other patents, Axel holds the patents "Method and apparatus for image processing", Patent number 7564996 and "Method and apparatus for image processing", Patent number 7489834.

Axel was involved in a number of startups in optical communication, Distributed Feedback Dye and semiconductor LASERs, high and continuous availability systems and resilience and survivability studies for exposed systems as well as in projects for the US Department of State.

Additionally, he is a Venture Partner at and serves as an advisor to Pegasus Tech Ventures, a global VC firm that conducts the Startup World Cup Challenge.

He has been involved in cryptographic research (prior to NIST creating the crypto challenge and subsequently defining and publishing crypto standards) and securing data in transit and data at rest for nearly as long as he has been using and developing solutions for HPC. Additionally, Axel has defined what it takes to secure the devices that secure the data at rest and data in transit. Axel is known as a disruptor and a creative mind to come up with new solutions, and he particularly likes to prove people wrong if they claim something is undoable. To that effect, he was behind the world's first CML high-speed serial links on bulk CMOS, which was believed to be impossible to do. He is also behind the world's first combined virtually output queued (CVOQ) switch fabric and many other inventions in the areas of processor and accelerator architectures, communication I/O, cyber- and device security, protocols, cache coherency and I/O offload.

His current focus is HPC and Machine Learning for LLMs as the workload characteristics for both are converging. Many experts in the HPC and ML community are raising flags about the current direction of the industry as Moore's Law came to an end, General-Purpose CPUs don't show drastic improvements in absolute performance and performance per Watt any more, and the accelerator space is very fragmented. More importantly, there is no universal high-bandwidth and low-latency interconnect between processors and accelerators commensurate with their performance levels. Axel had identified this trend a long time ago and is working on solving this issue with better (more linear) performance scaling that will lead to better HPC. Currently, the patents for that beyond-von-Neumann and beyond-Harvard scaling are pending.