Rob Sherrard, Head of Cloud: Why I Joined Niobium
I co-founded Nimbix back in 2010 because I believed high-performance computing shouldn’t be locked away in national labs and three-letter agencies. Why should only a handful of players get to solve the really hard problems? We set out to put supercomputing power in the hands of anyone who needed it, including those in manufacturing, energy, chip design, weather, and eventually AI. It felt like the early days of a new frontier.
That same feeling hit me again when John Barrus reached out in December 2025 to talk about what Niobium was building.
Private Compute for a World That Can't Afford to Be Exposed
Nimbix pushed accelerated compute before most people even knew the term. We deployed FPGAs in the cloud in 2010 when people said no one would ever move beyond Intel CPUs. We became one of the first to offer GPUs in the cloud, betting that computation would expand far beyond traditional processors.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) feels like that moment all over again, only bigger.
Most enterprise data is private. Computing on that data in the clear is reckless and often illegal, but increasingly powerful AI applications make it seem equally irresponsible to leave that data sitting idle. Enterprises have troves of sensitive information they desperately want to put to work, but they can’t risk exposing it. FHE is the only technology that lets you compute on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. The problem has always been that it’s too slow and too complex for real-world use.
Niobium is changing that with The Fog, our custom cloud platform where data never has to be exposed to be useful. Keys stay with the owner, nothing is decrypted, and the work still gets done. The Fog is the bridge between the academic promise of FHE and practical, commercial applications.
The Team: Full-Stack Ambition, No Ego
What pulled me in wasn’t just the technology. It was Niobium’s full-stack approach to solving FHE at every layer.
Niobium owns the stack: the hardware (starting with the mistic Core FPGA and moving to ASIC), the SDK, the developer tools, and the cloud environment itself. No awkward dependencies, no handoffs that slow things down. That kind of vertical integration is incredibly powerful when you’re tackling something this hard. It’s also where I’ve been most eager to roll up my sleeves.
The leadership team sealed it. Kevin Yoder, Dave Archer, John Barrus, and the rest bring together deep FHE expertise with real hyperscale execution experience. They have ambition without ego, and a collaborative spirit that reminds me of the best moments building Nimbix. There’s patience, generosity, and a genuine focus on building an ecosystem that works for developers, whether they’re cryptography experts or not.
Together, we aren’t just focused on another infrastructure play. We’re democratizing access to a new computing paradigm so that commercial use cases can finally emerge.
The Moment: FHE Is Where HPC Was 15 Years Ago
I’ve spent over 20 years in data centers, dev ops, service delivery, and scaling systems across advertising, banking, streaming, and HPC. My journey started early, running production for AudioNet (which became Broadcast.com) out of Mark Cuban’s apartment. I’ve seen waves of new technology move from research and niche use into the mainstream.
FHE is still largely in the academic realm and with three-letter agencies, much like HPC was when we started Nimbix. The exciting part now is building the commercial ecosystem and opening the doors so developers and enterprises can experiment, build, and uncover use cases we haven’t even imagined yet.
The Fog makes that possible through a straightforward cloud portal, curated applications, and tools that let users provision hardware, deploy FHE workloads, and get results without needing to be crypto experts. Cryptographers will build the foundational apps, and over time everyone else will simply consume the capabilities.
It’s the same analogy I lived with HPC: make the hard parts invisible so people can focus on productivity and time-to-results.
We’re very early, and that’s what makes it thrilling. Enterprises are just beginning to figure out how to use sensitive data safely with AI. Privacy isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s becoming a core business requirement.
Niobium’s customers will build a generational lead in private computation. After everything I’ve built and learned, I’m grateful to be joining them on this journey.
