Yeah. So you're five years in. Are your chips deployed now in any edge devices, or are you still working toward that?
So we are deployed. I would still say it takes a long time in our business to really scale. Like the cloud business or the consumer business, where the design and cycle is fast, the embedded space thinks takes a long time.
But then the other positive is that they stay for production for 15, 20 years. So it's a game of inertia. Getting in is pretty hard, and the opportunity to stay in production is also pretty significant.
So we have quite a few customers that are moving to production with us globally. And over the next year or two, we are excited about scaling more and more customers to get into production with us.
Yeah. And how many people are at the company right now? And how do you scale a company like this?
Because as you said, the demand is massive.
We are about 160 of us today. And with a lot of consultants, I think, or contractors, we are on 200. So I would say wrongly, we are 200 people working at the company.
We are lean. We are credit lean for what we are doing. And it really is kudos to everybody that works here in that it's a startup and we do whatever it takes to make things happen.
And we are in some ways doing what many companies use, tens of thousands of people to get done. And I'm a big, big admirer of everybody that we have here. I'm biased and these are all more than employees, family for us and that we do whatever it takes to go make things happen.
The macro thing that is a priority for us is scaling. Is scaling our go-to-market and how do we touch 40,000 customers in scaling our go-to-market partners that we have, reps and distributors and VARs and ODMs and ISVs. And again, I go back to not only myself, but I think we have had a lot of experience scaling businesses in our career before.
And so we retain the core of the company to be small. But through a partner network, we expand our footprint and where we go look to. The underlying thing that really enables us, Craig, is really our software.
And more self-managed the software is, the more the customers can manage themselves. That's a large, large component of how we can enable the scaling. If every one of them needed a hand holding, we don't have a company.
One day, I think, we are going to touch tens of thousands of customers and it will be a very exciting scaling opportunity for us.
Yeah. And the biggest market, I would assume right now is the United States, but I don't know. I mean, this is a global phenomenon.
Absolutely.
I think by footprint, North America would be the largest market for us, no doubts. But we are enjoying the benefit of our customer traction in Europe, Japan, in Korea and India too. And about 70 of our team members are based in Bangalore in India.
And we also are building out sales and go to market activities in India. And I think India is going to be a massive growth, in general, a doctor of AI. And we feel like we are one of the leaders and pioneers in this category of edge market scaling.
And I am quite convinced that I think in the next 10 years, this is going to be a high priority for every nation, a high priority for every industry sector. And people that don't have an AI-enabled environment are going to be left behind. And I think it's a matter of now who's wanting to gain leadership position.
There's going to be a fear of missing out that's going to go through the entire customer base.
Yeah. And you were talking about how I'm going to avoid the word again, but how you use your chip is not specialized one particular application. But is there an application that at some point it seems, if not in the design of the chip in scaling your sales and marketing and all of that, you've got to focus on a few applications and let the others come to you.
Which are you guys focused on?
I would say robotics, industrial automation, and vision systems. If you really do a Venn diagram of those three, I think that'd be a key gravity area for us. And I should expand on that and saying, every day our struggle is specificity versus generality.
So we've got to really make this balance happen. And I've built products before that will work for 40,000 customers, where you build one thing, every one of them is doing something radically different than the other, but it all still ends up being mostly the performance, mostly the power, mostly the cost that they need. Not easy to go to.
And we have learned and built good businesses earlier in our career, and we have used that experience to build it. And I would say, though I explained our gravity point of our highest volume, where I think we're going to drive, most people are going to find out that I think we are better than everybody else for their application as well, and all the other market segments we've already talked about.
Yeah, this wasn't, I wasn't going to ask this, but it just occurs to me on this question of scaling. You know, the big boys are all chasing this market as well. What's your future?
Do you think you guys will end up as part of a larger, you know, Google or Nvidia or somebody at that scale? Or is your expectation to stay independent and grow to that scale?
Really good question. And I would maybe give you two or three things that I think maybe I should mention. One is what I've learned now in five and a half years, and all my career I've been in large public companies, and this is my very first startup.
I started and what I've really come to recognize and truly internalize this, it's not the size of the dog, but it's the size of the fight in the dog that matters. I've been in very large companies and I always wondered, my God, we need more to get things done. There are 200 people and we are doing things of 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 people companies.
When you really build yourself into an element of, this is our team and this is what we're going to go do, and this is our life and blood, you operate very differently. That's one thing. The second thing I should say is, I have no idea how to predict the future.
What I do know is if you have results, you have options. We have really submitted ourselves to not worry about what outcome is ahead of us. We don't know.
What I do know is if I drive results, I have outcomes. And if I don't have results, I don't need to worry about outcomes. And so we single-mindedly put our head down to really focus on driving to be the best in the category that we are in.
And we cannot be everything to everybody. We really need to focus and do a good job of what we do. And our company definitely has been interesting to a lot of people.
I think that should be a fair thing for me to validate. And I think it would be fair to say that I think we are definitely noticed by everybody, by our customers, by our peers. So what our future really holds?
TBD. When I wake up every day and go, there's one thing to get done, and I drive back home saying, yeah, we got that done today. And I'm happy.
Yeah. And this is getting off subject, but I'm curious about the fundraising journey. How easy was it to get the initial capital?
And are you still raising funds?
I would say two things. I think for a long time, investments in chips had dried up. Chips were no longer really a high priority and a focus just because of the investment amount needed to the return cycle.
It just didn't fit every C mold. And so almost from 2005 till maybe even 2016, 2018, there are hardly any chip startups. It's now a key gold rush, and there's an enormous amount of attention and span put into it.
And I would say raising money is hard. Anybody that starts a company, if you walk in assuming that raising money is easy, I would urge you just really pragmatically internalize that it's hard to do. But I also simultaneously held the notion that the right kind of idea, the right kind of system and a setup always is capable of attracting good capital in any circumstance.
And we've been very lucky. We have raised around 270 million so far. And we have amazing investors that are all deep pedigree investors.
And it's public information that I think are key investors, Fidelity, Dell Technologies, Amplify Partners, and recently we extended around and added in Maverick and also Point72. So these are a few and these are household names as it comes to deep tech, and also companies with deep pockets. So having money always helps.
Having great people around you that know everybody and can connect you helps. Having a great board helps. And you need all of that to really go pull this off.
And so it's my day job to be raising money every day. I'm thinking about raising money every day. We have done well so far.
We also manage the money well. And I think we have carved ourselves out to be an industry-leading company. And I do think that I think at some point we'll be earning some more capital to further our growth and our growth.
Yeah. The other the other difficult thing is hiring good people. I mean, they're particularly when you have somebody like Nvidia, you know, vacuuming up people.
Has that been a challenge?
I would say it's been less of a challenge than I had expected. It would be my answer. Again, hiring is really difficult.
Hiring good people is harder. Hiring amazing people is even harder. And in a startup, you better have amazing people.
And how do you get 200 people to do something that tens of thousands are doing, right? And it's not just amazing people, amazing people that are good team players. So you do the and function of all of this.
You kind of come back to a very small universe of human beings that really fit all of that. And what we do is not just chips, it's software, it's AI, it's computer vision, it's automotive. Not easy thing to go to.
And so what's really helped us is network. I've spent 30 years. I've known a lot of good people that collectively believed in me and I believed in them.
And so there's a network, not just me, everybody that's around me has a network. And so the network's really helped a lot. The second thing is we're building something that's industry leading.
And I'm an engineer. You want to be part of a winning formula. You want to be part of a David vs. Goliath fight. You want a story in your life where you said, hey, we started with nothing and we built something that beat the very best. So we have done that now and that also attracts a lot of people and that people like success.
And they're like, wow, 200% company. And we have publicly validated that we are the best in class in the category that we are in. And people want to be a part of the winning problem.
So I would say it's been easier than I had expected, but every single hire is hard. Every single hire is something we pay a lot of attention to. And even now, though we are close to 200 people, I know everybody in the company and I kind of know their spouse and I know their children.
And we need that family environment to really attract more people. And then it's not just hiring, retention too is hard. And people in our trade are the most sought after personalities in software and hardware and AI.
And so it's not just hiring, but it's also retaining and creating an environment where it's motivating and they choose to stay and choose to really be part of a winning formula. So that's, I would say, you've covered fundrais, you've covered people, you've covered solving tough problems, you've covered customers and winning. And that's what I wake up to every day and it's my day job to make sure I play my part.
But luckily, I have amazing people around me that also do way better than me luckily. I'm really glad to see them become a good company.
Where do you see the chips going? I mean, we're getting into specialized accelerators. There's now, I had somebody from Western University in Australia.
I think that's the name of the university. They're building a brain scale, neuromorphic computer using FFPGA. Is that right?
Yeah.
Programmable arrays. And where do you see this going? Are we going to end up with a highly fragmented chip market where depending on your use case, you'll use one kind of a chip?
Or do you think that and then there's quantum chips? Sure. Is neuromorphic and quantum, do you think that they're going to eventually take a big share of the market away from the market?
Great question, Craig. And hard to predict the future because you're probably going to be more wrong than right. And with that caveat out there, so what actually motivates architectural choices very rarely silicon alone.
It's actually software. And so part of the reason why neuromorphic and quantum, though these are not new concepts, they've been around for a long time, is the ability to scale software to deliver the eventual performance and power that you need with the ease of use. It always ends up being the case.
And case point, neural networks are not new. AI is not new. It's been talked about from Turing Times 100 years ago.
End of the day, it's math. It's all Newtonian calculus end of the day. And so you need to really wait for the software maturity and the right silicon ability to deliver that.
That's really the form of where things are. My observation is that I think everything gets hyped a little too much too quick. And things take way longer than people estimate.
And what people underestimate is, how do you scale a proof point? And so a proof point is easy. How do you scale a proof point to becoming an industry standard?
And it always is 10 to 15 years longer than people estimate. So I have no doubts that there is a large portion of a future that's going to be a combination of some version of technologies we have today. No doubts neuromorphic has a play, no doubts analog has a play, no doubts quantum computing has to be a part of it.
And each one brings various different benefits. But they also have large deltas of things that need to be solved for scaling. A proof point doesn't make a product.
Yeah. And so that's really where the gap's at. So I definitely think that the world will have a plethora of choices ahead of it.
And to play this out, there's also biocomputers, DNA computing. And so there's a lot, I think, still ahead of us. And I would say, what I think I foresee for the next 10 plus years is still going to be the mainstream technology driving, or the known that we have today, still being the majority of the deployments, maybe 95, 99 percent of all the deployments.
But I think 10, 20, 30 years old, I think there will be an opportunity for newer elements to come together. So that's my jaded 30 years of seeing this and expecting and hoping and things being delayed story. But I think I'm a little more right on this than wrong, I think.
By popular demand, Netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind, flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com/eye On AI. That's Eye On AI, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I, all run together.
Again, head to netsuite.com/eye On AI. netsuite.com/eye On AI, where it's one-of-a-kind, flexible financing program.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
So we are deployed. I would still say it takes a long time in our business to really scale. Like the cloud business or the consumer business, where the design and cycle is fast, the embedded space thinks takes a long time.
But then the other positive is that they stay for production for 15, 20 years. So it's a game of inertia. Getting in is pretty hard, and the opportunity to stay in production is also pretty significant.
So we have quite a few customers that are moving to production with us globally. And over the next year or two, we are excited about scaling more and more customers to get into production with us.
Yeah. And how many people are at the company right now? And how do you scale a company like this?
Because as you said, the demand is massive.
We are about 160 of us today. And with a lot of consultants, I think, or contractors, we are on 200. So I would say wrongly, we are 200 people working at the company.
We are lean. We are credit lean for what we are doing. And it really is kudos to everybody that works here in that it's a startup and we do whatever it takes to make things happen.
And we are in some ways doing what many companies use, tens of thousands of people to get done. And I'm a big, big admirer of everybody that we have here. I'm biased and these are all more than employees, family for us and that we do whatever it takes to go make things happen.
The macro thing that is a priority for us is scaling. Is scaling our go-to-market and how do we touch 40,000 customers in scaling our go-to-market partners that we have, reps and distributors and VARs and ODMs and ISVs. And again, I go back to not only myself, but I think we have had a lot of experience scaling businesses in our career before.
And so we retain the core of the company to be small. But through a partner network, we expand our footprint and where we go look to. The underlying thing that really enables us, Craig, is really our software.
And more self-managed the software is, the more the customers can manage themselves. That's a large, large component of how we can enable the scaling. If every one of them needed a hand holding, we don't have a company.
One day, I think, we are going to touch tens of thousands of customers and it will be a very exciting scaling opportunity for us.
Yeah. And the biggest market, I would assume right now is the United States, but I don't know. I mean, this is a global phenomenon.
Absolutely.
I think by footprint, North America would be the largest market for us, no doubts. But we are enjoying the benefit of our customer traction in Europe, Japan, in Korea and India too. And about 70 of our team members are based in Bangalore in India.
And we also are building out sales and go to market activities in India. And I think India is going to be a massive growth, in general, a doctor of AI. And we feel like we are one of the leaders and pioneers in this category of edge market scaling.
And I am quite convinced that I think in the next 10 years, this is going to be a high priority for every nation, a high priority for every industry sector. And people that don't have an AI-enabled environment are going to be left behind. And I think it's a matter of now who's wanting to gain leadership position.
There's going to be a fear of missing out that's going to go through the entire customer base.
Yeah. And you were talking about how I'm going to avoid the word again, but how you use your chip is not specialized one particular application. But is there an application that at some point it seems, if not in the design of the chip in scaling your sales and marketing and all of that, you've got to focus on a few applications and let the others come to you.
Which are you guys focused on?
I would say robotics, industrial automation, and vision systems. If you really do a Venn diagram of those three, I think that'd be a key gravity area for us. And I should expand on that and saying, every day our struggle is specificity versus generality.
So we've got to really make this balance happen. And I've built products before that will work for 40,000 customers, where you build one thing, every one of them is doing something radically different than the other, but it all still ends up being mostly the performance, mostly the power, mostly the cost that they need. Not easy to go to.
And we have learned and built good businesses earlier in our career, and we have used that experience to build it. And I would say, though I explained our gravity point of our highest volume, where I think we're going to drive, most people are going to find out that I think we are better than everybody else for their application as well, and all the other market segments we've already talked about.
Yeah, this wasn't, I wasn't going to ask this, but it just occurs to me on this question of scaling. You know, the big boys are all chasing this market as well. What's your future?
Do you think you guys will end up as part of a larger, you know, Google or Nvidia or somebody at that scale? Or is your expectation to stay independent and grow to that scale?
Really good question. And I would maybe give you two or three things that I think maybe I should mention. One is what I've learned now in five and a half years, and all my career I've been in large public companies, and this is my very first startup.
I started and what I've really come to recognize and truly internalize this, it's not the size of the dog, but it's the size of the fight in the dog that matters. I've been in very large companies and I always wondered, my God, we need more to get things done. There are 200 people and we are doing things of 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 people companies.
When you really build yourself into an element of, this is our team and this is what we're going to go do, and this is our life and blood, you operate very differently. That's one thing. The second thing I should say is, I have no idea how to predict the future.
What I do know is if you have results, you have options. We have really submitted ourselves to not worry about what outcome is ahead of us. We don't know.
What I do know is if I drive results, I have outcomes. And if I don't have results, I don't need to worry about outcomes. And so we single-mindedly put our head down to really focus on driving to be the best in the category that we are in.
And we cannot be everything to everybody. We really need to focus and do a good job of what we do. And our company definitely has been interesting to a lot of people.
I think that should be a fair thing for me to validate. And I think it would be fair to say that I think we are definitely noticed by everybody, by our customers, by our peers. So what our future really holds?
TBD. When I wake up every day and go, there's one thing to get done, and I drive back home saying, yeah, we got that done today. And I'm happy.
Yeah. And this is getting off subject, but I'm curious about the fundraising journey. How easy was it to get the initial capital?
And are you still raising funds?
I would say two things. I think for a long time, investments in chips had dried up. Chips were no longer really a high priority and a focus just because of the investment amount needed to the return cycle.
It just didn't fit every C mold. And so almost from 2005 till maybe even 2016, 2018, there are hardly any chip startups. It's now a key gold rush, and there's an enormous amount of attention and span put into it.
And I would say raising money is hard. Anybody that starts a company, if you walk in assuming that raising money is easy, I would urge you just really pragmatically internalize that it's hard to do. But I also simultaneously held the notion that the right kind of idea, the right kind of system and a setup always is capable of attracting good capital in any circumstance.
And we've been very lucky. We have raised around 270 million so far. And we have amazing investors that are all deep pedigree investors.
And it's public information that I think are key investors, Fidelity, Dell Technologies, Amplify Partners, and recently we extended around and added in Maverick and also Point72. So these are a few and these are household names as it comes to deep tech, and also companies with deep pockets. So having money always helps.
Having great people around you that know everybody and can connect you helps. Having a great board helps. And you need all of that to really go pull this off.
And so it's my day job to be raising money every day. I'm thinking about raising money every day. We have done well so far.
We also manage the money well. And I think we have carved ourselves out to be an industry-leading company. And I do think that I think at some point we'll be earning some more capital to further our growth and our growth.
Yeah. The other the other difficult thing is hiring good people. I mean, they're particularly when you have somebody like Nvidia, you know, vacuuming up people.
Has that been a challenge?
I would say it's been less of a challenge than I had expected. It would be my answer. Again, hiring is really difficult.
Hiring good people is harder. Hiring amazing people is even harder. And in a startup, you better have amazing people.
And how do you get 200 people to do something that tens of thousands are doing, right? And it's not just amazing people, amazing people that are good team players. So you do the and function of all of this.
You kind of come back to a very small universe of human beings that really fit all of that. And what we do is not just chips, it's software, it's AI, it's computer vision, it's automotive. Not easy thing to go to.
And so what's really helped us is network. I've spent 30 years. I've known a lot of good people that collectively believed in me and I believed in them.
And so there's a network, not just me, everybody that's around me has a network. And so the network's really helped a lot. The second thing is we're building something that's industry leading.
And I'm an engineer. You want to be part of a winning formula. You want to be part of a David vs. Goliath fight. You want a story in your life where you said, hey, we started with nothing and we built something that beat the very best. So we have done that now and that also attracts a lot of people and that people like success.
And they're like, wow, 200% company. And we have publicly validated that we are the best in class in the category that we are in. And people want to be a part of the winning problem.
So I would say it's been easier than I had expected, but every single hire is hard. Every single hire is something we pay a lot of attention to. And even now, though we are close to 200 people, I know everybody in the company and I kind of know their spouse and I know their children.
And we need that family environment to really attract more people. And then it's not just hiring, retention too is hard. And people in our trade are the most sought after personalities in software and hardware and AI.
And so it's not just hiring, but it's also retaining and creating an environment where it's motivating and they choose to stay and choose to really be part of a winning formula. So that's, I would say, you've covered fundrais, you've covered people, you've covered solving tough problems, you've covered customers and winning. And that's what I wake up to every day and it's my day job to make sure I play my part.
But luckily, I have amazing people around me that also do way better than me luckily. I'm really glad to see them become a good company.
Where do you see the chips going? I mean, we're getting into specialized accelerators. There's now, I had somebody from Western University in Australia.
I think that's the name of the university. They're building a brain scale, neuromorphic computer using FFPGA. Is that right?
Yeah.
Programmable arrays. And where do you see this going? Are we going to end up with a highly fragmented chip market where depending on your use case, you'll use one kind of a chip?
Or do you think that and then there's quantum chips? Sure. Is neuromorphic and quantum, do you think that they're going to eventually take a big share of the market away from the market?
Great question, Craig. And hard to predict the future because you're probably going to be more wrong than right. And with that caveat out there, so what actually motivates architectural choices very rarely silicon alone.
It's actually software. And so part of the reason why neuromorphic and quantum, though these are not new concepts, they've been around for a long time, is the ability to scale software to deliver the eventual performance and power that you need with the ease of use. It always ends up being the case.
And case point, neural networks are not new. AI is not new. It's been talked about from Turing Times 100 years ago.
End of the day, it's math. It's all Newtonian calculus end of the day. And so you need to really wait for the software maturity and the right silicon ability to deliver that.
That's really the form of where things are. My observation is that I think everything gets hyped a little too much too quick. And things take way longer than people estimate.
And what people underestimate is, how do you scale a proof point? And so a proof point is easy. How do you scale a proof point to becoming an industry standard?
And it always is 10 to 15 years longer than people estimate. So I have no doubts that there is a large portion of a future that's going to be a combination of some version of technologies we have today. No doubts neuromorphic has a play, no doubts analog has a play, no doubts quantum computing has to be a part of it.
And each one brings various different benefits. But they also have large deltas of things that need to be solved for scaling. A proof point doesn't make a product.
Yeah. And so that's really where the gap's at. So I definitely think that the world will have a plethora of choices ahead of it.
And to play this out, there's also biocomputers, DNA computing. And so there's a lot, I think, still ahead of us. And I would say, what I think I foresee for the next 10 plus years is still going to be the mainstream technology driving, or the known that we have today, still being the majority of the deployments, maybe 95, 99 percent of all the deployments.
But I think 10, 20, 30 years old, I think there will be an opportunity for newer elements to come together. So that's my jaded 30 years of seeing this and expecting and hoping and things being delayed story. But I think I'm a little more right on this than wrong, I think.
By popular demand, Netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind, flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com/eye On AI. That's Eye On AI, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I, all run together.
Again, head to netsuite.com/eye On AI. netsuite.com/eye On AI, where it's one-of-a-kind, flexible financing program.
From Eye On A.I.: #206 Krishna Rangasayee: Why Edge AI is the Next Big Thing in Tech, Sep 4, 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/206-krishna-rangasayee-why-edge-ai-is-the-next-big/id1438378439?i=1000668396023
This material may be protected by copyright.