Operating CompanySilicon Valley / Bay Area

Pixar Animation Studios

Operating Company · Emeryville, CA

Emeryville (SF Bay Area). Born as the Graphics Group inside Lucasfilm (1979), spun out 1986 when Steve Jobs bought it. Created RenderMan, the rendering standard Hollywood VFX adopted — the tech that taught LA how to render (Toy Story, 1995 = first fully CG feature). Acquired by Disney 2006; Pixar's Ed Catmull and John Lasseter then ran Walt Disney Animation. The Bay-Area source of the compute capability LA productionized.

Founded

1986

Region

Silicon Valley / Bay Area

Investors

People

About Silicon Valley

Before venture capital and chip startups, the region was seeded by government-funded and corporate research — Stanford Research Institute (SRI) did defense-funded applied research there from the 1940s on, and Xerox PARC, decades later, quietly invented the graphical interface and Ethernet inside a copier company's research lab. Silicon Valley is a string of towns down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, named for the semiconductor firms — Fairchild, Intel — that came out of that same research culture, with Sun Microsystems later carrying the workstation-and-networking era forward before software and then AI layered on top. Stanford anchors it and UC Berkeley sits across the bay. What the region chose to build shifted with each era without ever fully leaving the last one behind — chip design, enterprise software, and frontier AI labs still operate there, often within a few miles of each other.

Region Stats

Total firms 196

VC / investors 63

Companies 117

Universities 16

Known For

Software

Semiconductors