fabless
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Yifeng Zhang
Yifeng Zhang is a Silicon Valley semiconductor entrepreneur and the co-founder, President and CEO of Mauna Kea Semiconductors (MKSemi), a fabless chip company building the industry's lowest-power ultra-wideband (UWB) system-on-chip solutions for wearables, IoT, smartphones and automotive. Before MKSemi he co-founded Quintic, a low-power Bluetooth and wearable SoC maker whose BLE and wearable business was acquired by NXP in 2015. He holds 15 patents in IC design and UWB technology and has spent more than two decades in digital, analog and mixed-signal design across Philips Semiconductors, NXP and ams.
Hao Zhong
Hao Zhong is the CEO and Co-Founder of ScaleFlux, a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor company that builds computational storage drives and CXL memory solutions for cloud, AI, and data center workloads. With 20+ years in flash storage and LDPC technology — including stints at LSI, SandForce, and Fusion-io — Zhong co-founded ScaleFlux in 2014 to rethink what a storage device can do: compress data in hardware, cut write amplification, and deliver 4x effective capacity at roughly half the price of standard NVMe SSDs. ScaleFlux has raised $288M in funding and posted record-breaking growth in 2024.
Nicolas Muller
Nicolas Muller is the co-founder and CEO of Arago, a Paris-based deep-tech startup building a photonic AI accelerator called JEF that uses light instead of transistors to perform AI inference at 10x lower energy than leading GPUs. Coming from a physics and machine learning background - including an ML degree from MIT - Muller co-founded Arago in 2024 alongside Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller. The company raised an oversubscribed $26M seed round in July 2025 backed by Earlybird, Protagonist, Visionaries Tomorrow, and angels from Apple, Datadog, Hugging Face and Arm. Arago's approach - top-down from inference efficiency requirements, not bottom-up from optics research - delivered a working prototype in under 12 months.
Sohail Syed
Sohail Syed is the CEO, President, and co-founder of DreamBig Semiconductor, a San Jose-based fabless chip startup he built into a chiplet platform pioneer before its $265M acquisition by Arm in October 2025. A serial entrepreneur from Pakistan who attended NED University and later earned an MBA from Cornell, Syed previously founded Questarium (acquired by Marvell) and FIRQuest (acquired by Corigine), and at Marvell helped grow a network switches business to $4 billion in revenue across 10 successful chip tapeouts. DreamBig's MARS Open Chiplet Platform - unveiled at CES 2024 - democratizes silicon development for AI, data centers, automotive, and edge computing, and the company raised $75M in a Samsung-led Series B in July 2024 before the Arm deal closed.