Intelligence, everywhere.
Intelligence, everywhere.
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” – Archimedes
Technology is the lever with which humanity moves the world, and AI might be our biggest lever yet. It has the potential to change everything.
But there’s one huge challenge facing the next Bezos, Page, Andreessen, or Zuckerberg of the AI era: intelligence is still too slow, too expensive, and too fragmented. Modern AI chains are multi-stage, multi-pass, and multi-modal, bouncing data across CPUs, GPUs, and network. Latency and cost — not model quality — now set the ceiling on what builders can ship.
We started 8080 to empower developers to create the world-moving companies of the AI era. 8080 is the first cloud built from the ground up for AI-native applications. We’re deploying mixed-compute racks that colocate purpose-built inference ASICs with CPUs, GPUs, and storage at the edge. By keeping every stage of a pipeline in-rack and just milliseconds from your core app servers or your end-users, we unlock applications that simply couldn’t exist before.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton
We envision a world where intelligence is everywhere, incorporated into every object, making human life easier and better every second of every day. Intelligence that is too cheap to meter and too fast to notice.
The Googles and Amazons of the AI era haven’t been built yet. They will be built on 8080, and because of 8080. We’ll be the shoulders upon which they stand.
The cornerstone of our infrastructure are next-generation inference ASICs. These chips run inference 100x faster, and 2000x+ more efficiently on a token/watt basis. 8080 will be the first cloud built from the ground up around this transformative technology.
We talk of companies being “AI-native,” but few have really scratched the surface. AI can do so much more. When model inference and the infrastructure surrounding it are fast and cheap enough, intelligence can be present in every layer of the stack and even in every function.
We want to support the most ambitious and perhaps crazy applications that will redefine “AI-native.” Somewhere, a dev is dreaming about adding AI into every frontend page render like some sort of intelligent CDN, another is dreaming about building a new Salesforce or Amazon that uses AI to do everything from search to generation to database operations, and a third is dreaming of something completely new that will change everything.
That future is ready to compile — build it on 8080.
We are not building a normal company. We’ve done that before, and believe that in the AI era there must be a better way. We are designing 8080 to accomplish our mission and are capping headcount at 10 until we reach $100M in revenue. That might not be possible, but we are going to try. In order to do that:
We don’t hire employees, we hire partners. As partners, we are self-directed, self-managed, have equal control over the company’s strategic direction, and total control over our specific areas of focus. Partners solve problems without being asked.
We hire seldomly, carefully, with unanimous consent, and only people who are proven top performers and great colleagues (with references to match). No managers. Just builders. A company of ten 10X builders, with 10X automation, should be as productive as 1,000 people.
Human time is precious, so we don’t waste a minute on anything not worthwhile. We use AI – built on our own platform – to automate everything we possibly can to save us and our customers’ time. Meetings are only held when vitally important because any minute wasted is a tragedy, whether it’s for our users or partners. We are default remote, but gather in person when it’s worth the time.
As partners, everyone is compensated highly and equally. As the company succeeds, partners will be able to participate in that success in various ways, most notably via profit sharing. We demand excellence and compensate accordingly.
If you’re interested in joining us, send us an email at join[at]8080[dot]io.
We’re looking for partners who want to build for building’s sake. Every partner is a full-stack builder, first, but also has, either by experience or passion, expertise that augments the rest of the team. We are looking for partners with expertise in the following areas:
North Star: server utilization and latency. Constructing state-of-the-art LLM inference infrastructure from scratch that handles millions of requests per second, maximizes hardware utilization, and intelligently routes each request to the optimal edge PoP for the lowest possible latency. This includes designing and implementing the global routing engine that decides—in microseconds—where every request should execute. Leveraging expertise in high-performance, concurrent, and distributed systems; proficiency in system programming languages like Rust, C++, or Zig; and experience with Postgres, AWS, Redis, Kafka, Zipkin, or Jaeger to architect a robust, scalable backend that integrates seamlessly with novel hardware, edge datacenters, and API services.
North Star: cost per token and revenue capacity. Managing the operations and finances of a company that is rapidly scaling hardware infrastructure and obsessed with keeping customer costs as low as possible. Controlling the end-to-end flow of capital, from equity financing to debt leverage to capex to opex to pricing strategies and customer contracts. Building automated systems to scale to hundreds of millions in revenue with very few people.
North Star: time to value. Crafting and enhancing all aspects of developer tooling and experience—from CLIs, documentation, and libraries to demos and community engagement. Building automation to support millions of developers, leveraging a passion for improving the ease with which they can build, thereby fostering a vibrant developer community.
As we build out capacity, we’ll start bringing on select customers in the Fall of 2025.
| Metric | Est. |
|---|---|
| Input Tokens Per Second | 300,000 |
| Output Tokens Per Second | 30,000 |
| Time to First Token (Metal) | 50 µs |
| Time to First Token (Cloud) | 20 ms |
Our goal is to make intelligence too cheap to meter. As of now, we’re targeting to charge less than $0.05 per million tokens, regardless of input or output, fine-tuned or not.
Our favorite local dev port is :8080, especially for side projects.
The Intel 8080 was the processor that ushered in the PC revolution.
Our mission is to put AI in every software loop. 8080 has a lot of loops.
Minimal characters for devs to type.
Symmetry. Visually appealing.
Ever since reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, we’ve always wanted to name a company with a number (like Corporation 9592).
It’s best practice to have a name that is easy to say and spell. This is not. It forces us to make the product so good that that won’t be an issue.
We’ll be adding more detail here as we get closer to launch. Until then, you can add your email here to stay in touch, and follow us on X.