Tagged: semiconductor
30 results
SkyeChip
SkyeChip is a Penang-based fabless semiconductor company that designs silicon intellectual property (IP) and custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Founded in 2019 by former Intel, Altera and Broadcom engineers, it specialises in advanced memory-interface IP (HBM3E, DDR5, LPDDR5/5x), UCIe die-to-die interconnect, network-on-chip fabrics and RISC-V CPU IP built on 6nm/7nm process nodes. Recognised as Malaysia's first homegrown AI chip designer, SkyeChip listed on Bursa Malaysia's Main Market in May 2026 in the country's largest IPO in 16 years.
Syenta
Syenta is an Australian deep-tech semiconductor company building next-generation chip-to-chip interconnects for the AI era. Spun out of the Australian National University, it has developed a proprietary process called Localized Electrochemical Manufacturing (LEM) that deposits and patterns metal in a single step, producing micron-scale interconnects across large packages with fewer process steps. The technology targets the 'memory wall' that limits AI and high-performance computing, aiming to raise interconnect density and bandwidth while cutting manufacturing cost and waste. Headquartered in Sydney with a new development facility in Tempe, Arizona, Syenta has raised more than A$37 million, with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joining its board.
Steve Huang
Steve Huang is the founder and CEO of KiWi New Energy, a Taiwan-born, San Mateo-based startup building what he calls an operating system for global renewable energy. A serial green entrepreneur with more than 15 years across the semiconductor and solar value chain, Huang went from NVIDIA and public silicon-wafer ventures to a near-total collapse when Chinese rivals undercut his micro-inverter business, then rebuilt around an AI-driven energy datacenter that matches clean supply with retail and small-business demand in real time.
Veerbhan Kheterpal
Veerbhan Kheterpal is the co-founder and CEO of Quadric, a Burlingame, California processor IP company building the Chimera general-purpose neural processor (GPNPU) for on-device AI inference. A three-time technology founder with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, he previously co-founded Fabbrix (acquired by PDF Solutions) and was a technical co-founder of 21, Inc. Quadric's software-first architecture aims to run any AI model without the obsolescence that plagues fixed-function AI accelerators, and the company has raised roughly $90M across its funding rounds while scaling licensing revenue sharply through 2025.
Neurophos
Neurophos is an Austin-based photonics startup building an Optical Processing Unit (OPU) that uses light instead of electrons to run AI inference. Spun out of Duke University and the Metacept incubator, the company packs more than a million micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators - roughly 10,000x smaller than conventional photonic elements - onto a single chip to perform the matrix-vector multiplication at the heart of large AI models. It positions the OPU as an energy-efficient, drop-in alternative to GPUs for data-center inference, and raised a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier in January 2026.
Synopsys, Inc.
Synopsys is an American electronic design automation (EDA) company that builds the software, IP, and simulation tools chipmakers use to design, verify, and manufacture advanced semiconductors. Founded in 1986 around logic-synthesis technology, it is one of three companies that dominate the EDA market and, following its $35 billion acquisition of Ansys in July 2025, has expanded from chip design automation into full silicon-to-systems engineering across electronics, structures, fluids, and optics.
Gilad Shainer
Gilad Shainer is Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA, where he leads the strategy, marketing, and ecosystem development for the company's networking portfolio — including InfiniBand, Ethernet, DPUs, and interconnect technologies that power more than half the world's top 500 supercomputers. A Technion-trained electrical engineer who graduated Cum Laude at both B.Sc. and M.Sc. levels, Shainer spent nearly two decades at Mellanox Technologies before joining NVIDIA via the $6.9 billion acquisition in 2020. He founded the HPC-AI Advisory Council in 2008, which now spans 400+ organizations globally, co-founded the ISC Student Cluster Competition, holds two R&D 100 Awards (2015 and 2019), and has authored or co-authored dozens of papers across IEEE, ACM, and Springer venues. At a moment when AI factories are rewriting the rules of data center design, Shainer is the person making sure the wires — and the protocols running through them — are ready.
CyberSwarm Inc.
CyberSwarm is a neuromorphic engineering company building brain-inspired, memristor-based hardware that lets machines learn and adapt locally, at the edge, without the cloud. Founded in 2017 by Mihai Raneti and headquartered in San Mateo, California with R&D roots in Ploiesti, Romania, the company is developing a neuromorphic System-on-a-Chip for cybersecurity and energy-efficient AI, positioning its architecture as a new computational layer between conventional digital systems and quantum computing. In May 2026 it raised a $50 million Series A to scale toward commercial deployment across automotive, aerospace, defense, healthcare and robotics.
Enfabrica
Enfabrica is a Silicon Valley chip startup building the networking and memory plumbing that lets tens of thousands of GPUs behave like one giant computer. Its Accelerated Compute Fabric SuperNIC (ACF-S) moves data at 3.2 terabits per second, and its EMFASYS memory fabric lets AI clusters borrow cheap DDR5 DRAM over Ethernet instead of buying more GPUs for capacity. Founded in 2019 by ex-Broadcom and Google networking engineers, the company raised roughly $290M before Nvidia paid over $900M in September 2025 to license its technology and hire CEO Rochan Sankar and much of his team.
eTopus Technology
eTopus Technology is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company that designs ultra-high-speed, ADC/DSP-based SerDes and die-to-die interconnect IP for data centers, high-performance computing, AI, 5G and storage. Founded in 2012 by Harry Chan and Peter Kou, the company licenses silicon-proven PHY IP - spanning 112G on advanced 6/7nm nodes down to 22nm - plus chiplet interfaces supporting UCIe, Bunch of Wires, PCIe Gen 5/6 and CXL. eTopus positions itself on low latency and low power, and has built collaborative chiplet platforms with partners including QuickLogic, OpenFive and CoMira.
Fabric Cryptography
Fabric Cryptography is a San Francisco hardware startup building the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) - a fully programmable custom-silicon chip with an instruction set designed specifically for advanced cryptography. Founded in 2021 by Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy, Fabric aims to do for cryptography what Nvidia did for AI: dramatically accelerate workloads like zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation compared with CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function accelerators. The company has raised $39M total, including a $33M Series A in August 2024 co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.
Frore Systems
Frore Systems is a Silicon Valley thermal-technology company that builds AirJet, the world's first solid-state active cooling chip, and LiquidJet, a direct-liquid coldplate for AI data centers. Founded in 2018 by two former Qualcomm engineers, Frore uses ultrasonic membranes to move air at over 100 mph with no visible moving parts, letting thin fanless devices and dense AI servers run cooler, quieter, and faster. In March 2026 it raised a $143M Series D at a $1.64B valuation, positioning its 'Thermal Stack' as foundational infrastructure for the AI era.
Point2 Technology
Point2 Technology is a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor company building ultra-low-power, low-latency interconnect chips and cables for AI/ML data centers. Its e-Tube platform sends data as radio-frequency signals through plastic waveguides - a third path between copper and optics - and its smart-retimer SoCs power 800G and 1.6T active electrical cables. Founded in 2016 by a KAIST professor and veterans of Marvell, Finisar and Samsung, the company has drawn investment from NVIDIA's NVentures, Bosch Ventures, Molex and UMC.
SecEdge
SecEdge is a Seattle-based digital security company that secures IoT and Edge devices from the silicon up to the cloud. Formed in 2023 by carving Privafy's IoT business out and acquiring embedded-security pioneer Sequitur Labs, the company packages hard problems - device identity, secure boot, key management, over-the-air updates and secure connectivity - into software products like the EmSPARK Security Suite, the EmPOWER lifecycle-management SaaS and SEC-TPM, a firmware TPM built in Arm TrustZone. Led by semiconductor and digital-security veteran Sami Nassar and chairman Rick Clemmer, SecEdge aims to make chip-to-cloud security something device makers can adopt off the shelf rather than build from scratch.
xMEMS
xMEMS is a Santa Clara semiconductor company that builds sound and cooling out of silicon. Its piezoMEMS platform produces the world's first solid-state MEMS loudspeakers - all-silicon drivers with no moving voice coils - for earbuds, hearing aids, AI glasses and headphones, and the first 'fan-on-a-chip' active micro-cooling device that moves air inside phones, wearables and AI data-center optics. Founded in 2018, the company holds more than 300 patents and has raised roughly $129M across four rounds.
Ram Sudireddy
Ram Sudireddy is the founder, chairman, president and CEO of Bento, a Boston-based dental benefits platform he started in 2017 after concluding that dental insurance, as sold, was structurally broken. Before Bento he built and sold three technology companies - Cimaron Communications to AMCC, CHiL Semiconductor to International Rectifier, and Mustbin to LifeSite - and chaired Sanovi through its acquisition by IBM. He is a semiconductor architect by training who now runs a dental payments company, which is the kind of career pivot that only makes sense if you spend a long weekend reading your family's EOBs.
Applied Brain Research
Applied Brain Research (ABR) is a Waterloo, Ontario AI hardware company spun out of the University of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience. It builds brain-inspired chips and software that run real-time AI - full-vocabulary speech recognition, text-to-speech and sensor processing - directly on edge devices at power levels measured in milliwatts. Its patented state-space models and the Legendre Memory Unit power the TSP1 Time Series Processor, which ABR calls the world's first single-chip solution for full-vocabulary speech recognition, doing the work of cloud voice AI while consuming 10 to 100 times less power.
Cambridge Terahertz
Cambridge Terahertz is an MIT spinout building a chip-based imaging system that combines the 3D vision of lidar with the see-through power of X-ray, but using human-safe terahertz waves at a thousandth the power of a cell phone. Shrunk from an airport-scale scanner into a palm-sized, two-pound device, its AI-powered sensors detect concealed weapons through clothing and bags, and can see inside sealed packages without opening them. Founded in 2023 by MIT PhD Nathan Monroe, the company raised a $12M seed round led by Felicis with participation from Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund.
Grovf
Grovf is a deep-tech semiconductor startup building AI infrastructure backend networking - RDMA and chiplet IP, soft IP cores, and scale-out NICs that connect AI accelerator servers at 400/800Gbps with sub-2-microsecond latency. Founded in 2017 in Armenia by Artavazd Khachatryan and Khachik Sahakyan, the company began with FPGA-accelerated databases for the Industrial IoT and evolved into networking fabric for large-scale AI model training. Grovf was the first company from Armenia and the Caucasus to win an EU Horizon 2020 SME Instrument grant, and went through UC Berkeley's SkyDeck accelerator.
Sonera
Sonera (Sonera Magnetics) is a Berkeley, California deep-tech company building chip-scale magnetic field sensors that read the body's own biomagnetic signals without touching the skin. Its flagship S1 chip performs magnetic muscle sensing (magnetomyography) at room temperature and in wearable form factors, aiming to make neural and neuromuscular data as easy to capture as a heart rate. Applications range from silent-speech interfaces in earbuds and glasses to gesture control for XR, plus clinical uses like portable brain imaging and neurodegenerative biomarker tracking. Spun out of UC Berkeley research and backed by an $11M seed round, Sonera is turning a lab-grade magnetics breakthrough into a scalable sensing platform.
Ben Hernandez
Ben Hernandez is the founder and CEO of Numat, a Chicago deep-tech company that treats chemistry like software. Numat designs metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), nanoscale materials that capture, hold, and even destroy specific molecules with atomic precision. Trained as an engineer with a law degree and an MBA, and a former private equity investor, Hernandez turned a Northwestern lab idea into the world's first industrial-scale MOF manufacturing campus, powering safer hazardous-gas storage for the semiconductor industry through its ION-X product and pushing toward industrial decarbonization.
Jerome Paye
Jerome Paye is the CEO of TAU Systems, an Austin-based deep-tech company shrinking mile-long particle accelerators down to the size of a shipping container. A physicist by training and a program-management operator by trade, he spent two decades launching Ford Mustangs, steering Renault's early electric-vehicle work, and running opposed-piston engine programs at Achates Power before joining a startup that wants to accelerate electrons to 10 GeV over 10 centimeters of plasma - and, along the way, replace the EUV light source at the heart of modern chipmaking.
Kevin Conley
Kevin Conley is the CEO of Applied Brain Research (ABR), the Waterloo-based startup commercializing brain-inspired, ultra-low-power chips for edge AI. A 30-plus-year semiconductor veteran, he spent more than two decades at SanDisk - rising to Senior Vice President and CTO - then led Everspin Technologies as President and CEO. He is named on 90+ patents covering non-volatile memory architecture and management.
Aitomatic
Aitomatic builds autonomous AI agents that capture and operationalize the hard-won knowledge of veteran industrial experts - the kind of know-how that quietly walks out the door when senior engineers retire. Founded in 2021 by ex-Google and ex-Panasonic veterans, the Palo Alto company has open-sourced OpenSSA (Small Specialist Agents) as an inaugural member of the AI Alliance with IBM and Meta, and released SemiKong, the world's first open-source LLM purpose-built for the semiconductor industry.
minds.ai
minds.ai builds AI systems for semiconductor manufacturers. Its Maestro platform - powered by the DeepSim engine - uses reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and generative AI to optimize fab scheduling, planning, forecasting, and control inside 24/7 wafer-fabrication plants. Founded in 2014, the company is based in Santa Cruz, California, with offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore.
Vinci
Vinci (Vinci4D, Inc.) is a Palo Alto physics-AI startup building a foundation model that simulates how hardware will behave before it is manufactured. Its system runs full manufacturing-resolution physics - thermal, thermo-mechanical and warpage analysis for advanced semiconductor packaging and 2.5D/3D chips - up to 1,000x faster than traditional finite-element tools, without meshing and without training on customer data. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Hardik Kabaria and Dr. Sarah Osentoski, the company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M in total funding and has been benchmarked by over half of the world's top 20 semiconductor companies.
Nathan Monroe
Nathan Monroe is the co-founder and CEO of Cambridge Terahertz, an MIT spinout building compact, affordable concealed-weapons detection. A PhD electrical engineer who demonstrated one of the largest terahertz phased antenna arrays ever built on standard CMOS, he shrank refrigerator-sized scanner physics into a device smaller than a toaster. After a school shooting marked his teenage years in Florida, he spent more than a decade at MIT turning terahertz sensing into a real product. Cambridge Terahertz uses safe, non-ionizing radio waves and AI to see weapons through clothing and packaging, and raised a $12M seed round backed by Amazon and Felicis.
PDF Solutions
PDF Solutions is a Santa Clara semiconductor analytics company that turns the firehose of chip-manufacturing and test data into decisions. Its Exensio platform connects fabs, foundries, OSATs and fabless designers, normalizing data across silos so customers can ramp yield faster, catch defects earlier and run AI/ML models on the factory floor. Founded in 1991 and public since 2001 (Nasdaq: PDFS), it serves 130+ semiconductor companies including TSMC, Intel, Qualcomm, Analog Devices and DENSO.
Ricursive Intelligence
Ricursive Intelligence is a Palo Alto frontier AI lab using artificial intelligence to compress the slow, expensive process of semiconductor design. Founded in late 2025 by Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, the co-creators of Google's AlphaChip, the company is building an end-to-end AI model that designs, verifies and closes silicon, aiming to create a recursive loop where AI designs better chips and those chips train better AI. It raised $335M across seed and Series A rounds, reaching a $4B valuation roughly two months after launch.
Kai Jiang
Kai Jiang is the CEO of Nuovo Film Inc., a Silicon Valley materials company that turns silver nanowires into the transparent conductive film behind touchscreens, foldable displays, and large-area interactive panels. Under his watch the company has shipped more than 2.3 million square meters of conductive film, holds 180+ patents worldwide, and claims roughly 60% of the global silver-nanowire market. A Stanford-educated operator with a McKinsey and semiconductor background, Jiang runs a business that is invisible by design: its product is the layer you touch but never see.