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.

“If you look at our current product, it’s pretty far away from the original starting point,” said Shen, who has served as Exostellar’s CTO since its founding. “Very different technology, very different software stack, very different vision and idea. However, every step is built on top of previous steps.”

Weatherspoon traces Exostellar’s foundations to a 2011 paper he co-authored that showed applications could migrate from one cloud to another while still running.

“Our success as a company is really built off of decades of research beforehand,” he said.

By 2016, Weatherspoon, Shen and van Renesse, a professor in Cornell Bowers, had developed a new technology around the original discovery. The innovation allowed applications to quickly move between cloud servers, which constantly vary in cost depending on demand. By automatically securing the most computing power for the least money, the team’s software could address the high cost of cloud computing, a major pain point for companies.

The team recognized a potential market opportunity, but none of the members had entrepreneurial experience at the time. After licensing their technology through Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing and founding Exostellar (originally called Exotanium), they reached out to Provost Kavita Bala, then the chair of the Department of Computer Science in Cornell Bowers, for early guidance.

“Exostellar exemplifies Cornell’s mission to make a real difference in the world through research and innovation,” Bala said. “It has been a pleasure to watch this team grow into entrepreneurs and to be a part of the community supporting them.”

Bala advised the team to join Rev: Ithaca Startup Works, a business incubator in downtown Ithaca. Mentors there recommended that the team hone their product-market fit through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which trains researchers to transform their technology from a research project into a successful product.

“All of this, for us, was 100% necessary because we had never done a business before,” Weatherspoon said. “It did really require a community for us to be successful, and there was a lot of support from the Cornell community.”

In 2019, Shen and Weatherspoon began working on Exostellar full time. The company joined the Praxis Center for Venture Development, an on-campus incubator that provides workspace, mentorship and access to Cornell facilities, resources and equipment. Exostellar also received funding from Ignite, Cornell’s gap funding program, for early support. 

In turn, the company hired students from computer science, engineering and business programs, and received angel funding from Cornell alumni.

As Exostellar’s first CEO, Weatherspoon led the technology’s transition from the lab to the marketplace. When it came time to scale the product in 2023, industry veteran Tony Shakib succeeded Weatherspoon, who stayed on as chief scientist.

Since then, Exostellar has developed capabilities to meet the emerging demands of AI infrastructure, an approach that aligns with Qualcomm’s vision for scalable, cost-effective AI deployment. 

Prior to the acquisition, Exostellar and Qualcomm partnered to build an AI infrastructure management layer into Qualcomm’s software. Now, the technology will become a core feature of Qualcomm’s AI product offerings.

“We’re almost beyond words with excitement,” Weatherspoon said. “It's validation that what we began creating, at some level, 15 years ago has significant value in the marketplace.”

Bridget Hagen is the associate manager for innovation communications for Cornell Research and Innovation.