An old phone is an awkward little inheritance. It still contains valuable materials, perhaps a functioning camera, perhaps several years of somebody’s life. Yet its usual retirement accommodation is a drawer. Pieter van Rooyen helped build a business around persuading people to open that drawer. The proposition was wonderfully legible: put the phone in a machine, receive cash. A complicated engineering problem acquired the manners of a vending machine.
He was one of ecoATM’s co-founders. Earlier, he had co-founded Zyray Wireless, which developed chips for the arrival of third-generation mobile networks. Later came Edico Genome, whose hardware accelerated the processing of sequencing data, and Pleno, which borrowed telecommunications methods for laboratory instruments. Read the company names in sequence and the career seems to change subjects every few years. Follow the engineering and the subjects begin to rhyme.
The interesting question is how someone learns to move between those worlds without treating each new field as a blank sheet. Van Rooyen’s route runs through South African universities, a California semiconductor company, familiar collaborators and a tree-mapping project. It contains acquisitions and patent portfolios, certainly. It also contains coffee. Even a career in advanced computation requires occasional support from a paper cup.
The teacher’s toolkit travels
Originally from Pretoria, van Rooyen earned his engineering doctorate at Rand Afrikaans University, now the University of Johannesburg. He went on to lecture at the University of Pretoria. Michiel Lötter, who would become a Zyray colleague, completed his doctorate there with van Rooyen as his supervisor. Before the company had customers, part of its working relationship had already been tested in the less glamorous business of doing the mathematics.
The published work gives that period some texture. With Lötter and Danie van Wyk, van Rooyen co-authored Space-Time Processing for CDMA Mobile Communications. Its contents include channel models, smart antennas and multiuser detection. It also includes simulation software written in Matlab, allowing readers to change assumptions and examine the consequences. The book asks its reader to do something with the theory.
Those subjects concern a practical difficulty: several signals must share a wireless environment, and a receiver has to make sense of what arrives. Antennas, coding and processing become ways of extracting useful information from a crowded channel. Years before Pleno, this was already van Rooyen’s professional vocabulary. The later change of industry would give the vocabulary a different set of objects.
His academic career has continued alongside the businesses. In August 2026, Stellenbosch University identified him as an Extraordinary Professor in its Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and as a co-founder of xTenure. The university affiliation brings the story back to a place where teaching, research and company building can occupy adjacent rooms. After California, the academic address is once again South African.
“I was born in Africa to wander and wonder.”
Pieter van Rooyen · LinkedIn introduction
A chip small enough to disappear
Zyray’s SPINNERchip tackled a specific transition. Phone manufacturers already had hardware and software for GSM and GPRS networks. Adding support for WCDMA, part of the emerging 3G world, could mean considerable redevelopment. Zyray offered an add-on baseband co-processor, a way to extend existing designs. The opportunity lay in making the next generation easier to reach from the current one.
At Zyray, van Rooyen served as founder and chief technology officer. He spoke about multiple-antenna systems and space-time processing in 2002 and 2003. These were engineering questions with commercial consequences: interference, power consumption, network capacity and range. A handset’s agreeable exterior conceals a considerable argument with physics.
Broadcom announced its agreement to acquire Zyray in June 2004. The announced share consideration was approximately $96 million, with an earlier $3 million investment in convertible notes to be cancelled. Contemporary accounts sometimes round the deal to $100 million. Whatever the shorthand, the buyer wanted technology and people that could help it enter the WCDMA market.
Asked about the financial change after the sale, van Rooyen supplied a modest yardstick: “Can I afford something better than box wine now? Definitely.” It is a useful interruption to the procession of semiconductor terminology. Here was an acquisition translated into a shopping decision, with enough humour to puncture the occasion.
The coffee becomes a kiosk
For ecoATM, the phone moved from engineering platform to unwanted possession. Robert Genthert, another co-founder, recalled a summer 2008 coffee-shop meeting with Mark Bowles and van Rooyen. A couple of weeks later, they asked him to help with the kiosk business model. His account describes a company that progressed from a laptop to a working kiosk in two years, with support from the EvoNexus incubator.
The system bought used devices through an automated, self-service transaction. That required more than recognising that electronic waste had value. A customer needed a convenient place to bring a device and a sufficiently clear reason to part with it. Cash provided a persuasive answer. The ingenuity included the transaction itself: turning recycling into an errand people could finish.
Outerwall completed the acquisition on July 23, 2013. Its reported aggregate purchase price was $350 million, including the 23 percent stake it already owned. At the time, approximately 650 kiosks were in the marketplace. Those details put the sale in proportion: a deployed retail network, a larger owner buying the remaining interest, and a machine that had already met actual customers.
The collaborators recur. Bowles and van Rooyen later co-founded Truvian Sciences together. On LinkedIn, van Rooyen has remembered the coffee origin himself and credited the group effort. His business history is populated by people who turn up again, carrying knowledge from an earlier venture. A company may be sold; a useful working relationship can remain available for the next idea.
Give the data a shorter queue
Edico Genome, founded in 2013 by van Rooyen, Robert McMillen and Michael Ruehle, applied specialised computation to another growing workload. Its DRAGEN processor arrived on a PCIe card with accompanying software. The system handled steps including mapping, alignment, sorting and variant calling. Large quantities of sequencing data needed analysis, and the company designed hardware around that particular job.
In July 2014, Edico announced $10 million in Series A financing, led by Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from Gregory Lucier and others. The combination is revealing: a wireless technology investor, an engineering team and a market with an expanding data burden. Edico had joined EvoNexus the previous year. The incubator connection supplied another familiar point on van Rooyen’s map.
An Intel collaboration followed in April 2015, pairing work on DRAGEN with Intel’s Xeon processors. The engineering ambition extended across processing stages and deployment settings. In 2017, Edico’s genome pipeline became available through Illumina’s BaseSpace Sequence Hub. By then, the company said its customers had processed more than 17 petabytes of data. The card had become part of a wider software and infrastructure conversation.
Illumina acquired Edico on May 15, 2018. Its announcement described field-programmable gate arrays working with proprietary algorithms, and a platform that could run locally, in the cloud or in a hybrid arrangement. Flexibility mattered alongside speed. A processing tool becomes more useful when it fits the places where people already keep their data.
At Edico, Lucier worked closely with van Rooyen on the board, management recruitment and commercial introductions. The acquisition was valued at $100 million. The portrait that emerges includes the engineering and the institutional work around it: hiring, financing, partnerships and access to customers. A faster processor still needs a route into somebody else’s workflow.
Pleno brings the old vocabulary back
At Pleno, the telecommunications connection became explicit. Its Hypercoding technology combines signal-processing techniques with biochemistry to distinguish many targets in a sample. The company recruited from the worlds of coding theory, software and systems engineering as well as laboratory science. For van Rooyen, the move placed familiar engineering methods in a different physical setting.
The people reflected the approach. In October 2022, Pleno announced Jason Trachewsky as vice president of software and Nambi Seshadri as chairman of its scientific advisory board. Both brought Broadcom experience. That month, Pleno also announced $40 million in Series A funding led by Deerfield Management, with Foresite Capital participating. A previous $15 million financing had been announced in May.
Van Rooyen was founder and CEO during this development period. In December 2024, Pleno appointed Vik Vaz as chief executive and president, alongside a $25 million Series B announcement. The distinction matters to his story: founding a company and running it are roles that can separate as the work changes. Pleno continued into its next commercial phase with a new executive in charge.
The Baobab Genome Project’s database goal. A target for the project, not a count of trees already mapped.
A different sort of branching out
Then there are the baobabs. Van Rooyen is a co-founder of the Baobab Genome Project with plant researchers Todd Michael and Levi Yant, and fellow engineer Gavin Stone. Its stated mission is to map baobab genomes and their geographic distribution. Its proposed database would encompass more than 10,000 trees. Anyone encountering a tree can contribute photographs, its location and a description.
The project gives his interest in information a landscape. Its research programme combines reference genomes, geographically dispersed samples and questions about how trees adapt to their environments. Some of the work concerns the extraordinary length of baobab telomeres and what further sampling might reveal about plant age. The database is an ambition; the research proceeds through particular trees and particular measurements.
It is an appealing place to leave this career for a moment. Zyray helped equipment carry more information. ecoATM gave old equipment somewhere to go. Edico made a specialised data task faster. Pleno carried telecommunications ideas into an instrument. Now a photograph and a map reference can help researchers understand a tree. Across these very different undertakings, van Rooyen keeps returning to the practical question of what useful information makes possible.