CEVA is the rare semiconductor company that does not need to manufacture a chip to collect from billions of them. Its bet is simple: as intelligence moves out of the cloud, the best tollbooth may be a small, power-efficient block of reusable silicon IP.

After helping design processors at Apple, Cisco and IBM, the DEEPX founder returned to South Korea with a stubborn idea: intelligence should live inside ordinary machines, without demanding a data center-sized appetite.