Sheryl Savage – Positron AI

The call that changed everything came near the end of Sheryl Savage‘s three years as general counsel at her previous company — time she’d spent helping construct a go-to-market pipeline and navigating a pivot from hardware sales to a Tokens as a Service model. She left in December 2024 with more than a strong résumé line. She left with clarity. Building companies was what she was made for, but she wanted in earlier — before the scaffolding went up, not after. Groq had already closed its Series C by the time she arrived, and that kind of head start wasn’t something she was willing to miss again.

Sheryl Savage | Positron AI | General Counsel

That clarity led her to Positron AI in January 2025, where she serves as general counsel for a company developing high-performance compute technology that brings together artificial intelligence and enterprise infrastructure. Positron AI provides advanced AI infrastructure solutions, partnering with major technology organizations to deliver compute capabilities that help businesses operate more efficiently and intelligently at scale.

Savage arrived as the 19th employee. The company will soon reach 100 people. In the months between, it has raised more than $350 million, achieved a valuation exceeding $1 billion, and surpassed $50 million in revenue — a pace that has surprised even her.

“The velocity of how we’ve gone from zero to one has surprised me,” she says. “I’m thrilled to see the acceleration of the organization and the product line and where things are going.”

What drew Savage to Positron wasn’t only the trajectory. It was the permission — or rather, the expectation — that she operate differently than most general counsels do. The traditional GC archetype, as she describes it, is a gatekeeper, a conservative voice in the C-suite who functions as a brake on risk rather than a co-pilot for growth. That model holds little appeal for her.

Savage has built her career on a different premise: that the art of practicing law is balancing risk, not avoiding it. That philosophy was reinforced early through nearly three years at a large technology company, where she observed how a risk-averse legal posture could dramatically slow a product’s path to market. The lesson stuck. She has since sought out CEOs and chief legal officers who share her appetite for calculated decision-making, and in Positron’s leadership — CEO Mitesh and founder Thomas Summers — she found exactly that.

“Thomas said to me more than once, ‘I don’t like lawyers,'” Savage noted with evident amusement, “but he still hired me.”

Building without a net

Savage came to Positron directly from Groq, where she served as general counsel and head of compliance. Before that, her path wound through TD Ameritrade, Plexus Corp., Flex, and NEXTracker, with three years in private practice before any of them. She holds a degree in political science and English from Bucknell University and a J.D. from the University of Baltimore School of Law. But the credential that seems to matter most to her is the one she has accumulated through repetition: knowing how to take a company from seed to exit and genuinely loving every stage of the process.

At Positron, that has meant leading legal due diligence for the company’s financing rounds, managing equity financing agreements, supporting preferred stock transactions, and coordinating the 409A independent valuation process — a rigorous process to ensure that employee stock option grants are priced fairly and defensibly under IRS guidelines.

“I advocate for our employees during the valuation process,” she says. “The goal is to make sure our company is fairly valued for both preferred shareholders and common shareholders.”

The work extends to some of the company’s most consequential commercial decisions as well. When Positron pursued a landmark partnership with Oracle, Savage was at the table — not just reviewing terms, but helping frame how a smaller player should approach a deal with a much larger one. Taking the agreement wasn’t without risk. Not taking it would have been riskier still.

The AI-first general counsel

Among the most striking aspects of Savage’s approach is her aggressive integration of generative AI into her daily work. Positron builds the inference chips that power agentic AI tools — purpose-built hardware designed to process AI queries faster and more efficiently as that technology moves from experiment to professional infrastructure — and its mandate is AI-first by design. But Savage has taken that mandate to an uncommon depth. She counts herself among the company’s top ten AI users across all functions.

The technology has allowed her to operate as what she calls a department of one without sacrificing output or quality. Contract review, policy creation, compliance monitoring, corporate governance — tasks that once required teams can now be accelerated by a single experienced attorney who knows how to use them effectively.

“I use the tools to supplement the 22-plus years of experience I bring to the table,” she says. “What I do here, you can ask AI to outline the roles of a general counsel — and each one of those factors, I expedite my contributions in those factors by being an AI-first general counsel.”

This is not an abstract commitment. Savage runs a recurring prompt every two weeks specifically designed to scan for changes in export control regulations that apply to Positron’s products — a necessity, given that specialized AI chips are subject to strict rules governing what can be shipped and to whom. In a regulatory environment where new restrictions can arrive with each change in administration, staying current is not optional.

Navigating the frontier

The compliance dimension of Savage’s role carries real stakes. Positron’s inference accelerators are among the most capable chips on the market for running large AI models — hardware powerful enough that the U.S. government tightly regulates its export. Ensuring that Positron’s technology doesn’t reach restricted entities or jurisdictions requires legal vigilance that goes well beyond standard contract work. She has found AI particularly effective at tracking regulatory shifts in this space, and she has structured her workflow accordingly.

That same forward orientation shapes how she thinks about the broader legal profession. Savage mentors a law school extern from her alma mater and has grown increasingly concerned about the gap between how law schools prepare students and what the profession demands in a technology-first environment. She doesn’t see herself becoming a professor, but she is drawn to the idea of helping young lawyers shed the conservative, risk-averse habits that traditional legal education often instills.

Her peers have noticed. Colleagues have described her as fearless, extremely hardworking, tenacious, and focused on core outcomes — a characterization that fits with how she talks about her own career. She is a member of the Women’s GC Network, a community of more than 2,000 general counsels who share resources, perspectives, and honest conversations about what it means to lead a legal function right now.

For Savage, that moment is defined by a conviction she states plainly: general counsels who don’t adopt generative AI won’t — or shouldn’t — have jobs within the next decade. It’s a striking position. But then, she has never been the kind of attorney who hedges when the data is clear.