Farhat Jahangir

Somewhere between managing a 300mm wafer fab for one of America's largest chipmakers and watching the semiconductor industry churn through the same broken vendor relationships, Farhat Jahangir made a decision that most executives in his position never do. He quit. He founded something.

The company is GS Microelectronics - GSME - and it is now, in early 2026, a $53M-funded semiconductor platform operating out of San Jose, California with 120 employees, two acquisitions in the books, and a Series B round closed in January 2026. It is not a company in stealth. It is a company mid-stride.

What Jahangir is building is distinct from the usual Silicon Valley chip startup pitch. He is not chasing a single breakthrough node, a proprietary architecture, or a narrow vertical. He is going after something harder: the infrastructure layer itself. The part where design houses, foundries, supply chains, and customers talk past each other at enormous cost. His stated mission - to transform semiconductor services into "a transparent, value-driven ecosystem" - sounds like consultant-speak until you understand the 25 years of operational specifics behind it.

He has run OSAT operations. He has managed yield improvements at scale. He has seen how a $1.1B acquisition absorbs a company. The frustrations he is solving at GSME are not abstract.

The Series B, $35 million, closed in January 2026 and was led exclusively by Maverick Silicon. That exclusivity is worth noting. A single investor taking the entire round is a statement about conviction - theirs and the company's. Manish Muthal, Senior Managing Director at Maverick Silicon, now sits on GSME's board. The total disclosed funding stands at $53 million.

Two months before that round closed, GSME had already acquired Muse Semiconductor, a multi-project wafer (MPW) services company built on TSMC technology, giving GSME reach into North America, Europe, and Asia. Three months before that, in July 2025, GSME acquired Sinble Technology Vietnam, adding over 150 specialists in backend implementation, low-power design, and DFT - all focused on TSMC advanced node work at 12nm FinFET and below. The acquisitions are not diversification. They are assembly.

Before GSME, Jahangir spent six-plus years as Senior Vice President of Manufacturing, Operations and Quality at Quantenna Communications. He was there for the IPO in October 2016 - a formative experience for anyone running operations at a company going public. He was also there in March 2019 when ON Semiconductor acquired Quantenna for $1.1 billion. He stayed through the acquisition, landing at ON Semi as VP and General Manager of Manufacturing, where he ran their largest 300mm fabrication facility at East Fishkill, New York.

That facility is large, complex, and expensive to operate. Managing it at scale, optimizing yield, managing margins, coordinating supply chain - this is the kind of work that either breaks people or makes them deeply opinionated about how things should run. Jahangir emerged from it with enough opinions to start a company.

Earlier in his career, he moved through Silicon Image, Texas Instruments, and Cypress Semiconductor - each a different vantage point on the semiconductor value chain. High-speed communication ICs. MEMS. System-level products. Offshore manufacturing facilities. The breadth is not accidental. It is the kind of career arc that reads differently once you see where someone ends up.