Mahyar Najibi is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at ElastixAI, a Seattle-based AI infrastructure startup building FPGA-based platforms for efficient large language model inference. He brings deep expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and AI optimization from his tenure at leading tech companies.

Mahyar earned his PhD in Computer Science from University of Maryland with a focus on efficient object detection, and holds an MS from Sharif University of Technology. His research has been cited over 6,500 times and includes groundbreaking work on multi-scale inference algorithms like SNIPER and AutoFocus.

At Apple, Mahyar contributed to Apple Intelligence as a Senior AIML Manager and Lead Scientist, co-authoring the OpenELM open-source language model framework. He previously spent three years at Waymo as a Senior Research Scientist advancing autonomous driving technologies, and worked as a researcher at Google.

ElastixAI emerged from stealth in February 2026 with an $18 million seed round led by FUSE, with backing from Catapult, Tyche, Liquid 2 Ventures, and DNX Ventures. The company's FPGA-based platform claims up to 50x lower total cost of ownership and 80% reduced power consumption compared to traditional GPU solutions.

Co-founded with former Xnor executives whose previous company was acquired by Apple for $200 million in 2020, ElastixAI is targeting the $255 billion AI inference market expected by 2030. The founding team brings combined expertise with over 24,000 research citations in machine learning and hardware optimization.