Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is Founder and CEO of a stealth startup, which he started in August 2026. It is his third company, after S.O.L.U.T.I.O.N.S (Mumbai, 1990) and Treelet Inc (San Jose, 2000).
Before that, he was an IBM Fellow and IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computing. He is an AI inference chip pioneer who, on July 16, 2004, founded Brain-inspired Computing at IBM Research and led it until July 2026. The project received more than $225 million in funding since 2008 from the US Department of Defense (now the Department of War), through DARPA (under SyNAPSE Program), the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, and the Air Force Research Laboratory, with additional support from the US Department of Energy and Commercial Customers. The ground-breaking project was multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, and multi-national and has a world-wide scientific impact. The resulting architecture, technology, and ecosystem breaks path with the prevailing von Neumann architecture (circa 1946) and constitutes a foundation for energy-efficient, scalable neuromorphic systems.
With his colleagues, Dr. Modha created three first-time-right silicon chips: Golden Gate, TrueNorth, and NorthPole. TrueNorth (2011 to 2018), a one-million-neuron chip in 28nm funded by DARPA, was published in Science in 2014 with the full cover and a personal profile. TrueNorth was commended by President Obama. NorthPole, a 12nm non-von Neumann AI inference chip with a novel memory-near-compute spatial architecture, was published in Science in 2023 with a cover mention and a Perspective article. For LLM inference, NorthPole, despite being fabricated in 12nm, delivers 70x higher energy efficiency at the same latency and 50x lower latency at the same energy efficiency versus state-of-the-art 4nm to 7nm GPUs. A rack of 288 NorthPole cards runs 18 instances of a 3-billion-parameter LLM at 500,000 tokens per second with 1 ms per-user inter-token latency while consuming only 30 kW, deployable in standard data centers without liquid cooling. NorthPole supports an ecosystem of more than 100 users.
Dr. Modha’s work has been featured in many thousands of media articles including The Economist, Science, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BBC, CNN, PBS, Discover, MIT Technology Review, Associated Press, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Spectrum, Forbes, Fortune, Time, amongst many others. His work has been featured on seven magazine covers, including Science, Communications of the ACM, and Scientific American. His map of the wiring diagram of the macaque brain (PNAS, 2010) served as the logo for IBM’s 100th anniversary celebration event.
Author of over 80 papers and inventor of over 380 patents, he has been awarded 2016 Scientist of the Year by R&D Magazine; Misha Mahowald Prize; ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize; USENIX/FAST Test of Time Award; Best Paper Awards at ASYNC and IDEMI; First Place, Science/NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Contest; IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumni Award; UCSD ECE Department Distinguished Alumni Award; Runner-up for the 2014 Science Breakthrough of the Year; 2015 R&D 100 Award (Editor’s Choice for IT/Electrical); and is a Fellow of IEEE and World Technology Network. In 2013 and 2014, he was named the Best of IBM. On their 40th Anniversary, EE Times named him amongst 10 Electronic Visionaries to watch. TrueNorth (2016) and NorthPole (2024) have both been inducted into the Computer History Museum, which published his oral history in 2025.
At IBM, Dr. Modha made significant contributions to IBM Businesses via innovations in caching algorithms for storage controllers, clustering algorithms for services, and coding theory for disk drives. He won the Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper award (Three Times), an Outstanding Innovation Award, an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, and Communication Systems Best Paper Award. He was an IBM Master Inventor. In 2010, he was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology. In 2014, he was appointed an IBM Fellow. He joined IBM Research Almaden in 1997 and left IBM in July 2026.
Dr. Modha holds a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California at San Diego.