Saleel Awsare

The Operator

A career told in quiet repositionings

Awsare is not a founder. He is the other kind of technology executive - the one called in to point a company at a different horizon and then make payroll meet it. He has done this three times.

The first was at Nuvoton Technology Corporation America, where he ran U.S. operations from 2008 to 2012. The second was Conexant Systems, where he served as president from 2012 to 2017. Conexant was a former Rockwell spinout that had been through every kind of corporate weather. Awsare narrowed it - audio, voice - until that focus made it acquirable. Synaptics bought it in 2017.

He went with the deal. At Synaptics, he ran the Enterprise and Mobile Division, the company's biggest. He was part of the team that walked Synaptics out of the saturated mobile-fingerprint market and into IoT and enterprise. The market valuation followed. Then in November 2023, the board at Lantronix called.

The Company

Lantronix, in one sentence

Founded in 1989 in Irvine, California, Lantronix has spent most of its life selling the unglamorous middleware of the connected world - device servers, out-of-band management, console managers, the boxes IT teams use to keep things alive when the network does not. Awsare's bet is that the next chapter is not networking. It is intelligence at the edge.

At the 2026 Roth Conference, he told investors the company had shifted, over two years, from a predominantly hardware-focused business into what he called a systems and solution player aimed at enabling Edge Intelligence with Compute & Connect. The phrasing is corporate. The change underneath it is not.

Physical AI, on the ground

When Awsare wants to make the abstract concrete, he reaches for drones. The reason is specific. Many of the drone applications now coming online - inspection in GPS-denied environments, defense, mission-critical video - cannot reliably ping a cloud. The compute has to live on the airframe. So does the AI inference. That requirement, repeated across smart cities, industrial sites, fleet telematics, and field instruments, is the market Lantronix is chasing.

In March 2026, Lantronix said the underlying edge-AI technology it makes is powering Sightline's AI-driven video processor for mission-critical drone applications. The drone revenue, Awsare told the Roth audience, is set to double.

A Santa Clara education and a Silicon Valley index

Awsare attended Santa Clara University - the school sits in the literal middle of the valley, surrounded by the companies its graduates run. He is a senior executive with more than twenty-five years promoting and developing technology solutions, with leadership roles spanning IoT, mobile, communications, and wireless. He sits in Redwood City; he runs a company in Irvine. The commute is the job.

The Forbes seat

In January 2025, Awsare was named to the Forbes Technology Council. The seat is what it sounds like - an invitation to publish, opine, and put a frame around the categories the council member cares about. The frames Awsare keeps reaching for: enterprise digital transformation, the IoT industrial buildout, and the way AI moves from data center to inference on the device.

He took the seat the way an operator takes a seat. He said he wanted to share thought leadership on the AI and IoT transformations shaping how enterprises do business. He did not promise to disrupt anything.

What the throughline looks like

If you lay the three presidencies down next to each other, the pattern is hard to miss. Nuvoton: a Taiwanese semiconductor with a U.S. footprint that needed a market story. Conexant: a once-vast chip business that needed to know what to be small about. Synaptics: a fingerprint-sensor maker that needed somewhere new to grow. In each case, Awsare arrived, narrowed, repositioned, and either handed the business off or rode the move up. Lantronix is the same exercise at full company scale.

Why now matters

The IoT and edge categories have spent a decade being a year away from a breakout. What changed under Awsare's first two years at Lantronix is that the AI side of the conversation finally needed silicon and connectivity to live at the edge - not because anyone preferred it that way, but because the bandwidth, latency, and privacy math made the cloud impossible for whole categories of work. Drones are the headline example. Smart utilities, fleet telematics, healthcare instruments, factory floors - the same logic.

It is the moment the company's catalog finally rhymes with the era. The CEO is the operator who got there in time.