President at SBT | 18 years of advising leaders in the semiconductor industry and architecting teams from startups to F500 companies
Here’s why Baya Systems made my list of the Top 13 AI/ML Startups to Bet On Changing the World… There’s no shortage of hardware startups trying to succeed in the realm of AI; our team recently counted around 210 new (started in the last 3-5 years) companies in the space. What makes any of them worth betting one’s career on is debatable, but Baya has the recipe figured out because even before they emerged from stealth, they had attracted some of the industry’s TOP talent to join their mission. Sailesh Kumar is one source of ‘gravitational pull’ for Baya’s talent. Before co-founding Baya, he had an illustrious career as Chief Architect at Huawei, founded Netspeed, and was a Fellow an Intel where he pioneered projects like the standardization of data center compute protocols. Those experiences gave him keen insights into the growing demand for compute, catalyzed by the rapid rise of AI, as well as the challenges system architects would face building next-generation AI systems. With the main culprits being the Memory Wall and the complexity of software, there were no apparent answers, and that was his catalyst. Sailesh launched a mission to break down the barriers preventing scalable AI by leveraging chiplets, aiming to usher in what he refers to as “The Chiplet Era” and during those first couple of years, Baya developed in stealth because chiplets were starting to gain traction and he didn’t want to tip their hand to the market. This is also when he did some expert-level recruiting. Tapping Jim Keller to join their Board gave Baya additional credibility and a galactic level of pull. Soon, other key leaders joined. Swapnil Lotlikar came over from a career at “big semi” companies and his expertise in cache coherence, memory, and SoC fabrics wasn’t just additive to Baya, it was exponential. Then Sailesh got a second star into orbit with the hire of @James Aldis, whose expertise in SoC interfaces and fabrics has defined standards, resulting in an industry ecosystem of IP that is critical to the evolution chiplets. Sailesh then hired Ameen Ashraf to be a Fellow and attracted Nandan Nayampally and Ravikanth Reddy into their planetary alignment. Nandan helped grow ARM’s CPU business to $1 billion and oversaw some of the world’s first deployments of neuromorphic Edge AI chips as CMO at Brainchip, and Ravi has been instrumental in developing interconnect fabrics like CXL and others that have set the stage for advanced interconnects. Building a star-studded team while in stealth speaks volumes about a leader and in my experience with working with founders to build their core teams, the quality of that team is the best gauge for measuring a startup’s chance of survival. Sailesh’s next challenge is execution and my advice to him and Baya is: don’t lose focus on your technical goals as a result of talent identification and attraction. Delivering WHILE scaling is much tougher. #semiconductorindustry #artificialintelligence #chiplets
