Zyphra is an American artificial intelligence and cloud computing company based in San Francisco, California, United States.

Zyphra operates through two divisions: Zyphra Research & Zyphra Cloud.

Zyphra Research develops open-weight multimodal large language models and conducts fundamental research on neural network architectures and learning algorithms. Zyphra Cloud provides AMD-optimized cloud infrastructure, inference, and agentic AI services for developers, enterprises, and hyperscalers.

In 2025, Zyphra raised a Series A funding round at a $1 billion post-money valuation, led by Jaan Tallinn, who previously led Series A rounds for DeepMind and Anthropic.

History

Zyphra was founded by Krithik Puthalath with the aim of pursuing open, human-aligned superintelligence. Puthalath recruited a founding team that included Beren Millidge, Tomas Figliolia, and Danny Martinelli.

During its pre-seed phase, Zyphra focused on exploratory AI research in learning algorithms and computing.

In early 2024, Zyphra Research published work on pretraining strategies for large language models in collaboration with Meta, Sequoia Capital, and Cisco, and released its first foundation model BlackMamba with a hybrid architecture combining structured state-space models with mixture-of-experts techniques.

Later in 2024, Zyphra released Zamba and Zamba2, a family of 7-billion-parameter hybrid SSM-attention foundation models. Zyphra also published additional research on agentic long-term memory, distributed inference acceleration algorithms (Tree Attention).

In 2025, Zyphra expanded into multimodality with ZONOS1 (text-to-speech) and reasoning with ZR1.

In 2026, Zyphra Research continued to release new models in the ZAYA family, including ZAYA1-8B, ZAYA1-70B-PREview and ZAYA1-Diffusion-Preview, demonstrating AMD scaling and research into alternative architectures for inference efficiency.

Zyphra also released multimodal models, including a vision-language model ZAYA-8B-VL and ZUNA, a brain-computer interface model for thought-to-text agents.

In May 2026, Zyphra launched Zyphra Cloud, an AI infrastructure cloud-computing platform with 15 megawatts offering bare-metal server compute, inference, post-training, and agent services optimized for AMD hardware.

Funding

In 2023, Zyphra raised an $11 million seed funding round with participation from Intel Capital, Future Ventures, and Bison (spinout from the Bill Gates family office).

In June 2025, Zyphra completed a $100 million Series A funding round at a $1 billion post-money valuation.

See also

  • Anthropic
  • OpenAI
  • Safe Superintelligence Inc.
  • Mistral AI
  • Poolside AI
  • Cohere