Today the Silicon Catalyst announced the admission of three early-stage companies into the semiconductor industry’s highly acclaimed incubation program. The three companies include two at seed-stage and Silicon Catalyst’s first post-Series A company:
- EcoCircuits BV (seed stage) based in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Smart and efficient power management solutions
- Mentium Technologies (seed stage) based in Santa Barbara, California. Analog in-memory computation for AI
- Quadric (post Series A) based in Burlingame, California. Edge processors for real-time AI
Silicon Catalyst uniquely provides startups with goods and services from a comprehensive network of In-Kind Partners (IKPs) to dramatically reduce the cost of chip development. Now in its fifth year of operation, Silicon Catalyst has reviewed close to 300 early-stage companies and has admitted a total of 21 startups into the incubator. These Portfolio Companies can utilize tools and services from a variety of Silicon Catalyst’s In-Kind Partners (IKP) design and test vendors, as well as access to shuttle / MPW runs with TSMC foundry services. Companies accepted into the incubator have 24 months of free or significantly discounted access to these IKP’s tools and services during the incubation period. The startups can tap into the rapidly expanding Silicon Catalyst network of Advisors and investors. Additionally, incubating companies can work with the newly established Silicon Catalyst Angels group to assist in funding their business growth.
It’s with great pleasure that we welcome these three, exciting early-stage companies into our incubator, as they are developing leading edge solutions spanning the edge computing, artificial intelligence and power management segments. Their innovative products are poised to significantly improve overall performance and cost-effectiveness across many industries and applications,” stated Pete Rodriguez, CEO of Silicon Catalyst. “In addition to the fact that we’ve now crossed the 20 company threshold of incubating companies, we’ve now also achieved two significant company milestones; our first European-based company, EcoCircuits, and although Silicon Catalyst has had several portfolio companies enter our incubator as seed-stage startups and exit our program with significant Series A funding, Quadric is the first post Series A company admitted to our incubator.”
New Portfolio Companies in the Incubator
EcoCircuits BV – Nijmegen, Netherlands: Bert de Koning, CEO and co-founder. EcoCircuits has developed patented Power Management chip technology that enables a significant increase of battery lifetime for wireless IoT devices. The EcoCircuits Battery Booster chip offers an innovative solution to improve the tradeoff between operating lifetime and power burst requirements for wireless transmission applications, resulting in higher reliability, longer lifetime and smaller battery size. The Battery Booster solution enables lower overall cost and delivers a breakthrough in miniaturization.
Mentium Technologies – Santa Barbara, California: Mirko Prezioso, CEO and co-founder. The company’s Analog Computing Memory (ACM) is based on Non-Volatile Memory devices used to carry out analog in-memory computation for AI / neural networks, eliminating the memory transfer bottleneck and exploiting the inherent efficiency of analog computation. Analog computing has previously suffered from technical limitation of dealing with variations and noise, leading to low precision computation. Mentium has solved these issues and the ACM solution has demonstrated superb resilience to temperature and device variations, delivering extremely fast and efficient AI computation.
Quadric – Burlingame, California: Veerbhan Kheterpal, CEO and co-founder. Quadric is building the industry’s only end-to-end architecture optimized for real-time edge computing. The company’s product family can be incorporated into a wide range of products that require instantaneous processing of real-world data streams with maximum speed with minimal power requirements. The company sells single-board supercomputers that are plug-and-play compatible with a broad range of after-market sensors. Quadric has a raised $15M to date. Their Series A was led by Denso, the tier 1 automotive company, who will also be one of Quadric’s customers for all levels of autonomous driving solutions. Other key investors include Leawood VC, Pear VC, Uncork Capital, SV Angel, Cota Capital, and Trucks Venture Capital.
As the earliest investor in Quadric, we invested in the company because of the massive market opportunity for edge computing and the technical talent of the co-founders,” said Mar Hershenson, Managing Partner at Pear VC. “The team is experienced with developing and shipping sophisticated processing technology with limited start-up resources. In just two years they have gone from zero to early system prototypes. Joining with Silicon Catalyst and their extensive network of ecosystem partners will further enhance Quadric’s business growth opportunities.”
