NextSilicon Appoints Rupal Hollenbeck President and Chief Business Officer to Lead Global Commercial Strategy

NextSilicon, a player in next-generation computing solutions for AI and HPC, announced the appointment of Rupal Hollenbeck as president and CBO. In this new role, Hollenbeck will lead all go-to-market activities, including sales, marketing, communications, strategic partnerships, business development, and customer engagement and success. Hollenbeck joins NextSilicon as it increases market adoption of the Maverick Intelligent Compute Architecture platform and advances its Arbel RISC-V processor roadmap.

As AI moves from single workloads to rapidly evolving, agentic and multimodal workflows, infrastructure must continually adapt and optimize for utilization, memory movement, and end-to-end efficiency. Maverick-2 was designed to meet that challenge with hardware that adapts to software in real time, which allows customers to accelerate changing workloads without costly code rewrites or vendor lock-in. Hollenbeck will work closely with the executive team to strengthen commercial execution, deepen relationships with customers and partners, and operationalize NextSilicon’s market growth.

“I’ve spent meaningful time with Rupal and came away convinced that she is the person I want alongside the leadership team and me for this next chapter,” said Elad Raz, founder and CEO, NextSilicon. “We are at a critical point, scaling Maverick in HPC, expanding into AI, and building our CPU roadmap with Arbel. Rupal brings the experience, judgment, and ambition we need, and I’m incredibly excited to build the future of compute with her.”

Hollenbeck brings more than 30 years of technology industry experience spanning enterprise computing, semiconductors, AI, cybersecurity, sales, marketing, and global operations. Most recently, she served as president of Check Point Software Technologies, leading the company’s global go-to-market organization. She previously served as CMO at Cerebras Systems and SVP and CMO at Oracle. Earlier in her career, Hollenbeck spent more than 23 years at Intel in executive roles across the United States and Asia, including global data center sales and Intel China.

“As AI systems become more agentic and workflow-driven, NextSilicon’s Maverick product line is increasingly able to adapt in real time, so customers can keep pace without constantly rebuilding their infrastructure,” said Hollenbeck. “What drew me to the company is a tremendously talented team that has proven that the technology works in production and delivers true global impact.”

NextSilicon’s Maverick-2 accelerator is already deployed at dozens of customer sites worldwide, including the Spectra supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories. Spectra recently achieved full system acceptance under the Vanguard program after meeting performance, stability, and application-compatibility requirements running mission-relevant workloads.

The company is also increasing its investment in its server-class RISC-V computing roadmap with Arbel, its enterprise-grade processor architecture designed for the evolving requirements of AI infrastructure and HPC. Together, these efforts reflect NextSilicon’s vision to rethink the compute platform across CPUs, accelerators, memory, networking, and software.

As the company moves to higher-volume commercial deployments, Hollenbeck will build and oversee the organization responsible for translating NextSilicon’s technology leadership into broader customer adoption, strategic partnerships, and sustainable global growth.