Private Tech Trailblazers Spotlight Vertical AI and Specialized Hardware

• Bear Robotics: Co-founder Bren Pierce shared that the company operates around 16,000 autonomous mobile robots, largely serving restaurants in Japan and Korea, alongside care homes and casinos. By utilizing foundation models and Nvidia’s Jetson Thor, development cycles have shrunk significantly.
• Address Robotics (All3): Operating in the construction sector, where labor accounts for 55% to 60% of costs, All3 builds an integrated value chain. CEO Rodion Shishkov explained that the company's software designs buildings from plots to permit-ready documents, directing industrial robots to mass-produce elements that mobile robots assemble on site.
• Harbinger Motors: Co-founder and CEO John Harris stated that the company builds electric and hybrid medium-duty vehicle platforms priced comparably to diesel. These vehicles save typical California parcel trucks around $30,000 annually in fuel costs.
• Unconventional AI: CFO Ali Esfahani highlighted that the firm designs hardware and software concurrently to cut AI power consumption by roughly 1,000 times. Using physics-based dynamics on standard semiconductor processes, the startup taped out a chip at TSMC that yields power metrics orders of magnitude below traditional systems.

Vertical AI Agents and Enterprise Scale

Specialized software and domain-specific data models are outperforming off-the-shelf options across multiple sectors:

• Bloomreach: CEO Raj De Datta noted that the company utilizes about 100 models, with its Loomi AI engine trained on 7 billion consumer profiles to deliver performance five to 10 times better than standard LLMs.
• Airwallex: Irvin Sha reported that the global financial operating system handles international accounts and payments across 80 to 100 economies, integrating AI agents to facilitate agentic commerce safely.
• Hippocratic AI: Shubhra Jain explained that the company deploys voice agents for healthcare tasks like scheduling and chronic disease management. To ensure safety, each setup uses 31 models, with one driving conversation and 30 supervising.
• CloudWalk: Founder and Luis Silva shared that the company automates 99% of customer support using agents running on its own Nvidia Blackwell GPU cluster, serving over 10 million active users through InfinitePay.

What it means for developers

For software engineers and developers building next-generation applications, the evolution toward vertical AI underscores the importance of domain-specific data and custom architectures over generic models. As specialized intelligence takes center stage, developers can easily test and integrate top AI models cheaply through one API at https://apixoai.online, streamlining experimentation across multiple leading providers without managing disparate keys.

According to JD Moriarty of Bank of America, capital markets in 2026 are heavily favoring scale, hardware, and semiconductors, reflecting a broader shift toward durability as AI companies prepare for public markets.

Source: 9 insights from ‘Private Tech Trailblazers’: Vertical AI becomes the growth engine — SiliconANGLE AI. Written by the Apixo team from that report.