TechCrunch Cerebras Systems went public Thursday, sending its shares soaring above $300 and turning Benchmark's $270 million investment into a stake worth more than $5 billion. Eric Vishria, the Benchmark partner who reluctantly sat down with the AI‑chip startup in 2016, recalled how a single slide about GPUs sparked his confidence in the fledgling team. After years of engineering hurdles, the wafer‑scale processor finally found a market, attracting customers like OpenAI, AWS and Abu Dhabi’s G42. The IPO’s success marks one of Benchmark’s biggest hardware bets in a decade.
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