Exostellar, a startup born from Cornell research, has achieved an outcome many entrepreneurs dream of – acquisition by a Fortune 500 company.
Qualcomm acquired Exostellar, launched in 2018 by computer science professors Hakim Weatherspoon and Robbert van Renesse and former postdoctoral researcher Zhiming Shen, Ph.D. ’17, in March.
“They say 99% of companies fail, so to be that 1% of successful exits is super exciting,” Weatherspoon said.
Initially, the founding team built Exostellar around Shen’s doctoral thesis on methods to make cloud computing faster and more secure. The company has since innovated on the technology to help companies run artificial intelligence more efficiently and cost-effectively, a shift that attracted Qualcomm.
“A lot of our customers have been very large corporations like Qualcomm because they use a lot of compute,” said Weatherspoon, professor and associate dean for belonging in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. “Using less compute to get the same job done is significant because you can either increase the throughput or decrease the usage and cost for the same thing.”
Exostellar recently pivoted to develop a product for AI workloads, which place unprecedented demands on computing resources.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/04/qualcomm-acquires-cornell-ai-software-startup