In September 2023, at a conference at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Albuquerque-based Hoonify Technologies Inc. gave a presentation. It included co-founder and Chief Operating Officer John Zivnuska, who discussed "benchmarking data" on the performance of the startup's high-performance computing software, called TurbOS.
At the conference was a medical radioisotope company that caught Hoonify's software presentation. Shortly after the conference wrapped up, Zivnuska said the company contacted Hoonify.
"They reached out to us, let us know that they were running out of resources," Zivnuska said. "It was hindering their ability to meet the milestones and deliverables that their contracts required for their customers."
After a few conversations about specific workflows and computational needs, Hoonify locked down a deal with the company — which Zivnuska declined to provide the name of — to use the startup's TurbOS supercomputing software.
"They're able to just drop their workflows or their workloads in and get their computational results," Zivnuska said. "It's a pretty easy, plug-and-play process."
The medical radioisotope company operates the software on hardware in the ADACEN Inc. data center in Albuquerque, the location where Hoonify has set up its new headquarters just over five months since striking a joint partnership agreement with the national data center company.
ADACEN, which operates a tier-3 data center in Albuquerque near the Albuquerque International Sunport and a tier-4 data center in Maryland, partnered with Hoonify in August 2023. The partnership allows the startup's customers to use ADACEN's hardware servers, which use a type of immersive cooling technology that ADACEN claims conserves power and cuts maintenance costs.
Hoonify has around a dozen operational customers using its software right now, including the medical radioisotope company, which Zivnuska called the startup's "lead customer." But more than 20 additional customers are "in the pipeline" currently, Zivnuska and Andrew Clark, Hoonify's co-founder and CEO, told New Mexico Inno.
Those potential customers span various industries, from academic institutions to private industry to national labs. It's a "nice spread" of potential customers, Clark said.
As part of that projected customer expansion, Hoonify is looking to grow its team. Right now, the startup consists of its founder and chief technology officer, Victor Kuhns, and four co-founders — Clark, Zivnuska, Connor Brown, who acts as vice president of software development, and Blake Kinnan, vice president of hardware development.
The startup could add two more people this year — one employee on the sales side and one on the technical side, Clark and Zivnuska said.
Alongside selling its TurbOS supercomputing software as a standalone service to customers in the form of subscriptions, Hoonify also has what Clark and Zivnuska called an "on-prem," or on-premises, option, which comes with hardware that the startup builds for specific customer needs. It costs $25,000 for a basic hardware system and an additional $5,000 to license the TurbOS software.
Since Hoonify's software is "hardware agnostic," as Clark said, users can run it on their own hardware, pending any necessary changes to the back-end code to tailor it to different hardware systems. TurbOS is, in a sense, an operating system layer that runs Hoonify's high-performance computing code, Clark said.
Does the startup plan to raise money in 2024 to help grow, in the form of venture capital or other sorts of equity investments? Well, it's not married to the idea and isn't currently seeking outside funding.
"We're really hoping to bring in enough revenues that we can grow organically," Zivnuska said. "It may not be necessarily as fast, but we get to continue to make those decisions because we understand the environment. Especially the federal side."
Part of Hoonify's federal expertise comes from being able to host what's called "Controlled Unclassified Information," or CUI. It's a uniform system that allows various government agencies to provide federal codes to private companies.
Hoonify needed approval to run the CUI code used by the lead medical radioisotope customer, which had already received clearance to run the code. The same requirement isn't needed for types of open-source high-performance computing codes, Clark said.
Customer growth across various industries and a bit of hiring are two main focuses for Hoonify in 2024. So, too, Clark and Zivnuska said, is partnering with other companies based in the Land of Enchantment.
"We've got a lot of collaborations with local New Mexico companies coming up," Zivnuska said. "That's a tenet of our company — working with New Mexico and helping build New Mexico."
