Adit Singh Joins Mayfield After Spotting Cerebras Early

Adit Singh’s move to Mayfield brings a technically trained chip investor back to the center of the AI infrastructure market. He was a Foundation Capital partner when he helped source and co-lead Cerebras’s first institutional funding round—an early bet that later helped Foundation become Cerebras’s third-largest shareholder.

By the time Cerebras completed its May IPO, Foundation held roughly 7% of the company, which was valued at nearly $50 billion. 4 Singh is now joining Mayfield as an infrastructure partner, where he will focus on the technologies that support AI from silicon to physical systems. 4

Why Adit Singh is known for Cerebras

Singh trained as an electrical engineer and chip designer before moving into venture investing. That background gave him a way to evaluate hardware companies across the full technology stack: from the application and workload a system is designed to run down to the transistor-level implementation of the chip. 4

That perspective was particularly relevant to Cerebras, which was an obscure chip startup when Foundation backed it. Singh helped assess the company’s unconventional hardware approach early, before its later market profile made the investment easier to recognize. 4

The eventual outcome made the investment notable. Foundation’s approximately 7% holding made it Cerebras’s third-largest shareholder at a valuation of nearly $50 billion following the company’s May IPO. 4

What Singh will do at Mayfield

At Mayfield, Singh will invest in four related areas:

• AI hardware and semiconductors
• Infrastructure software
• Cybersecurity
• Physical AI 4

The mandate reflects a broader view of AI infrastructure than chips alone. It includes the computing, networking, security and physical systems needed to build and operate AI products at scale.

Mayfield says it has invested at the infrastructure layer for more than 56 years and across more than 100 infrastructure exits. 17 Its current AI strategy includes a stated $3 billion investment focus, while the firm describes itself as an early institutional investor for AI founders. 23

Singh’s path from Foundation to Mayfield

Singh left Foundation Capital in 2017 and co-founded Neotribe Ventures, which he led for four years. He later joined early-stage investment firm Cota Capital. 4

The Mayfield role extends that progression from technical company evaluation to investing at the earliest stages. It also gives Singh access to a larger capital base at a time when infrastructure startups increasingly raise very large seed and “mega-seed” rounds. According to the report, Mayfield’s roughly $3 billion in assets under management allows it to write seed checks of up to $20 million—an advantage when smaller funds may be shut out by deal size. 4

Why Mayfield’s semiconductor portfolio mattered

Singh said Mayfield’s semiconductor portfolio was a major reason the firm appealed to him. Two examples highlighted in the report were Upscale AI and Lumilens. Upscale AI had recently reached a $2 billion valuation, while Lumilens had raised $700 million at a $5.5 billion valuation, according to the report. 4

Mayfield describes Lumilens as an AI infrastructure connectivity company developing optical transceivers and near-package and co-packaged optics technologies for scale-out and scale-up systems. The company announced more than $900 million in total funding at a $5.5 billion valuation. 17

Upscale AI represents the networking side of the same infrastructure thesis. Mayfield says the company is building an AI-native networking platform and announced a $200 million Series A at unicorn scale. 21 Together, the two investments show why Mayfield’s portfolio was relevant to Singh: AI performance depends not only on processors, but also on how systems connect and move data.

The Navin Chaddha connection

Singh’s recruitment was also built on a long-standing relationship with Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha. Chaddha has known Singh for 15 years, and the two have served together on three startup boards, including Upscale AI and Velaura AI. 4

Chaddha said recruiting Singh took “a long time,” although no exact duration was disclosed. The two described the timing as the moment when the “stars aligned.” 4 That history gives Mayfield more than a new investment hire: it adds a partner whose technical judgment and company-building experience are already familiar to the firm’s leadership.

The larger significance of the move

Singh’s appointment reflects how venture firms are competing for expertise in AI’s underlying infrastructure. His Cerebras record gives him a prominent early hardware investment, while his engineering background is suited to evaluating companies whose value may depend on difficult technical details that are not visible at the application layer.

For Mayfield, the combination strengthens its ability to invest at inception across chips, networking, infrastructure software, security and physical AI. For Singh, it is a return to a large platform with the capital and portfolio breadth to pursue the next generation of foundational AI companies. 4