AI/ML
Composable systems software supplier Liqid has refreshed and strengthened its senior executive team as AI tokenomics brings memory pooling front and centre to accelerate GPUs.
Liqid was founded in 2015 and has raised a total of $150 million, with the last round being a $100 million C-round in December 2021. It has been selling and developing its Matrix composable systems software for twenty years. In 2022 we wrote Liqid’s software composes virtual servers, using pools of separate CPU+DRAM, GPU, Optane SSDs, FPGA, networking, and storage resources accessed over a PCI fabric. They are composed from resource pools when needed and the components returned to their pools when the virtual server is no longer required.
Since then Optane has gone away, CXL has become a stringer offering and, hhen memory pools exist on CXL fabrics, composability software will be needed to dynamically allocate it to servers, giving Liqid OEM opportunities with server suppliers such as Dell. Liqid launched a reference architecture at SC23 to build a composable system with a Dell PowerEdge server fitted with up to 16 Nvidia GPUs.
This focus on memory pooling and GPUs, withan Nvidia relationship, was far sighted because ChatGPT started the AI large language model boom at he end of 2022 and Liqid found itself ideally positioned to help memory-constrained GPU server systems.
In July 2025, it unveiled composable GPU servers with CXL 2.0 memory pooling, announcing products enabling host server apps to access dynamically orchestrated GPU server systems built from pools of GPU, memory, and storage, focused on AI inferencing and agents.
This year we have seen the rise in Nvidia-driven KV Caching schemes and a focus on tokens. The faster GPUc can process them the bette and the key is memory. The more memory a GPU server can access the better it can do its work, but HBM has limited capacity. KV caching schemes are a fix but every off-HBM data access costs latency wasted time. Better, Liqid says, to have dynamically constructed pools of memory shared by GPU servers.
It realized that the market opportunity was broader and deeper, and expanding faster than it could deal with, as Neoclouds joined enterprises and OEMs as sales targets. The board, including CEO Edgar Masri, set about transforming the company to be more aggressive in chasing this AI-boosted, memory-focused, composability market. Liqid has, in nine months, replaced its CEO, CFO, CRO, Chief Product Officer, hired a Chief Commercial Officer, and appointed a board-level, growth-focused, heavy hitter. Here’s the timeline:
Dec 2025 - President Dave Larson becomes
interim CEO(Dec 2025-Mar 2026)Dec 2025 - CEO Edgar Masri left post and is now a Liqid board advisor Feb 2026 - AJ Dye hired as CFO
Mar 2026 - Rick Hegberg hired as CEO. Part-time board member from Oct 2025
Apr 2026 - Co-founder J Scott Cannata returns as
[Senior Fellow](https://www.crunchbase.com/person/scott-cannata)after becoming fractional CTO at iYuga Oct 2025 - Apr 2026.Apr 2026 - Tim Pitcher hired as
[CRO](https://www.liqid.com/company/leadership)May 2026 - John Byrne joins 4-person board
July 2026 - Dan Berg appointed Chief Product Officer
Aug 2026 - Eric Shiroke appointed Chief Commercial Officer
Aug 2026 -
Milissa McCarthyappointed SR Director, Strategic Partners
All this has been done relatively quietly with the Berg and Byrne appointments being press released but the others done with no fanfare.
When Liqid appointed John Byrne to its board in May this year it said a “global sales, channel, and OEM go-to-market leader joins Liqid’s Board as the company scales to deliver superior tokenomics across enterprise organizations, Neoclouds, and cloud service providers.”
Byrne, we’re told, has more than three decades of building and scaling industry-leading sales, channel, and partner organizations at Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, and AMD. He brings operational discipline and expertise that will help fuel the company’s continued growth as tokens become the default currency of AI infrastructure, and memory and GPU pooling move from an emerging category to enterprise standard.
Liqid said: “AI is at an inflection point. Enterprises racing to deploy AI inferencing are confronting a memory wall and stranded GPU capacity that legacy server architectures cannot solve. Liqid’s memory and GPU pooling, powered by Liqid Matrix software, is being adopted across major OEM, enterprise, and service provider customers to increase performance and optimize utilization to deliver superior tokens per dollar, tokens per watt, and tokens per second. Byrne’s experience scaling OEM, channel, and direct go-to-market motions across global theaters maps directly to the next phase of Liqid’s growth.”
CEO Rick Hegberg said: “Liqid is growing because our memory and GPU pooling is becoming foundational to delivering superior tokenomics. John’s leadership and counsel will help us achieve broader OEM reach, deeper customer impact, and the kind of operating discipline that will help Liqid reach a new plateau in this evolving market.”
Byrne said: “Memory and GPU pooling infrastructure is no longer a future-state idea; it is proving to be the way enterprises will deploy AI at scale. Liqid has all the components for accelerated growth: an exceptional team, the deepest patent portfolio in the space, and a software-defined approach that fits how the world’s leading OEMs and customers actually buy.
When Dan Berg was appointed Chief Product Officer last month Liqid said he “will own product management, strategy and engineering for Liqid's entire product portfolio including Liqid Matrix and the company’s software-defined memory and GPU pooling infrastructure. Berg will play a key role as the company deepens its OEM relationships and continues its focus on solving the AI infrastructure challenges facing Neoclouds and enterprises.”
Hegberg announced a a strategic collaboration with AMD to deliver next-generation AI infrastructure solutions built around the new AMD Instinct MI350P GPUs in July. Hegberg was an SVP at AMD from 2002 to 2007, moving on to VP and SVP roles at Micron, Qualcomm, Western Digital, NetApp, Gartner and then CEO at Vesper and Caspia Technologies.
Liqid wants us to know that its matrix software delivers “superior tokenomics … powers next-generation AI inference, KV cache, in-memory databases, VDI, virtualization, and HPC workloads. It enables customers to manage, configure, reconfigure, and scale essential memory, compute, accelerators (GPU, DPU, TPU, FPGA), storage, and networking into physical bare-metal server systems in seconds. Customers can optimize their IT infrastructure and achieve up to 100 percent memory and GPU utilization for maximum tokens per watt, tokens per dollar, and tokens per second.
Bootnote
Liqid has no CMO. That may need to change so that Liqid's messaging can be composed more effectively and flood across its target markets.