Sherjil Ahmed is a founder, inventor and mathematician who has spent more than twenty-five years bringing new silicon and software to market. He is Co-founder and CTO of Morphics, where he leads engineering.
Early career
After earning bachelor's and master's degrees from Georgia Tech, Sherjil built cable and optical products that were sold to Scientific Atlanta and NEC. He has a continuous patent record dating to his first filing in 2000.
Building silicon companies
Sherjil co-founded three venture-backed companies: Avaz Networks, Quartics and X-Prime. The first, Avaz Networks in Irvine, developed devices that carried voice and fax over packet-switched networks for carrier, cable and wireless markets. Avaz was later acquired by Quartics, and its team joined the new company.
In 2003 Sherjil co-founded Quartics with Safi Qureshey and served as its president. Quartics built media processors that decode, encode and transcode video in real time, and products that send high-quality video from PCs to TVs, monitors and projectors over USB and wireless links. Across these companies his silicon work has included carrier-gateway voice and video chips, a media processor designed into laptops, and a set-top-box chipset deployed in millions of units.
Computing on encrypted data
At his third company, X-Prime, Sherjil conceived a fully homomorphic encryption platform: a way for computers to add and multiply encrypted data without first decrypting it, with minimal data expansion and improved processing efficiency. The work is protected by U.S. Patent 10,333,696, filed in 2017 and granted in 2019.
AI for the legal profession
Sherjil then founded Mindrover.ai, an AI-native case management platform that serves more than 400 law firms.
The mathematics behind Morphics
Since 2015 Sherjil has developed an algebra of tree-structured data, formalized and machine-verified in the Lean proof assistant, aimed at bringing energy efficiency to power-hungry computing. He turned to this work full-time, and it became the foundation of Morphics.
At Morphics
As Co-founder and CTO, Sherjil leads engineering for the Morphics memory management plane, from the PCIe module to the host-side agent.