applied-ventures
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The Pennsylvania Startup Betting That Silicon Still Has Room to Run
Everyone said the next leap in power electronics had to come from exotic materials. iDEAL Semiconductor bet it could wring more out of plain silicon - and now its chips are shipping from a Minnesota fab.
Rajesh Swaminathan
Rajesh Swaminathan is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backs bold founders reinventing how the world powers, builds, and heals itself. With two decades of deep-tech investing experience spanning Bell Labs, Deutsche Bank, Applied Materials' venture arm, and now one of Silicon Valley's most storied VC firms, he leads investments across renewables, industrial decarbonization, advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, compute infrastructure, and the intersection of all of these with AI. A chemical engineer by training who was awarded the President of India Medal at IIT Madras and later earned an MBA from Harvard, Rajesh brings rare depth - scientific rigor, financial discipline, and operational empathy - to backing the founders who will, as he puts it, 'save the world.'