A Silicon Valley chipmaker set out to license a transistor. The harder lesson was that the useful product was the whole radio-frequency chip - and the heat it could spare a crowded Wi-Fi box.
Boingo began by making airport Wi-Fi easier to buy. Twenty-five years later, its real product is the invisible layer beneath airports, bases and ballparks - a lesson in moving from a convenient app to infrastructure that is painful to replace.
The San Francisco startup survived a year-long shipping stumble by making the router feel less like equipment and more like an appliance. A decade later, its real product is not the white box - it is fewer reasons to think about Wi-Fi.
NETGEAR has spent 30 years making the box that blinks in your closet. Now it is trying to turn that hardware into recurring revenue - and in 2025, for the first time in five years, the bet moved the numbers.
Ziply Fiber inherited an old Northwest telephone network and made a blunt bet: keep digging until fiber reaches the places larger providers skipped. Now the same company selling home broadband is carrying 400-gigabit traffic between Seattle and Chicago.
Omni Design Technologies builds high-performance, ultra-low-power semiconductor IP - the data converters and mixed-signal blocks that move information between the analog and digital worlds. Its Swift family of ADCs, DACs and analog front-ends sits inside SoCs for AI infrastructure, 5G/6G, Wi-Fi 7, automotive lidar/radar, satellite links, and quantum control, fabricated on processes from 28nm down to advanced FinFET nodes.