Participated · Series A · Jul 2022

Finwave Semiconductor develops transistors and differentiated GaN-on-Si RF chips designed to optimize the potential of Gallium Nitride (GaN). Its portfolio includes GaN FinFETs, advanced E-mode MISHEMTs, and high-performance RF switches. The company's chips target a wide array of RF applications, including communications infrastructure (base stations, MIMO, small cells, land mobile radios, customer premise equipment, fixed wireless access), Wi‑Fi routers, satellite, radar, drones, anti-drones, test & measurement equipment, and medical equipment. Led by CEO Dr. Pierre-Yves Lesaicherre and based in Waltham, MA, Finwave positions its technology across both infrastructure and mobile markets. The company recently raised funding to accelerate revenue generation, expand its product portfolio, and continue developing its GaN-on-Si technology. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Finwave Semiconductor is a Waltham, MA–based company that develops GaN transistors and 3DGaN technology for high‑frequency applications. Its 3DGaN technology and new transistor are designed to optimize Gallium Nitride (GaN) to support industries including 5G, AI, cloud computing, and electric and autonomous vehicles. Finwave says 3DGaN improves linearity, output power and efficiency in 5G mmWave systems while reducing costs for carriers. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Dr. Bin Lu, the company has offices in Massachusetts and California and partners worldwide. The company raised $12.2M in a Series A and plans to use the proceeds to expand the team, product development activities and lab facilities.

Participated · Series A · Feb 2019

GreenWaves develops the GAP8 family, an ultra-low-power RISC-V / PULP parallel processor for on-device machine learning inference in battery-operated edge devices. GAP8 targets IoT and consumer battery-operated applications including wearables, people and object counting, machine health monitoring, home surveillance, voice control, face detection and recognition, consumer robotics, micro-drones and smart toys. The processor emphasizes leading energy efficiency, ultra-fast wake up, low standby power and dynamically adjustable frequency and voltage. GAP8 was launched in February 2018; more than 300 development boards have been sold and the company reports multiple customer designs in progress. GreenWaves positions itself as an early RISC-V silicon vendor with a differentiated technical and market approach. The company is developing a second-generation product to provide a quantitative and qualitative leap in capabilities for intelligent, battery-powered edge devices. GreenWaves Technologies designs ultra-low-power embedded processors and software to run image, audio and vibration AI on battery-operated sensing devices. Its flagship product, GAP8, is a RISC-V–based IoT application processor featuring an 8-core computational cluster, a convolution hardware accelerator and a separate core in an independent voltage/frequency domain for communication and control. GAP8 is optimized for energy-efficient CNN inference and a wide spectrum of image and audio algorithms, enabling use cases such as always-on face detection, people counting, machine health monitoring, speech recognition and low-cost machine vision. The company provides a GAP8 Software Development Kit and guided toolchain to port trained CNNs and offers evaluation boards for pre-order; a development board rollout was planned for April 2018. GreenWaves builds on the open-source PULP and RISC-V projects and emphasizes capital-efficient engineering to speed time to market. The company was founded in 2014 and is headquartered just outside Grenoble, France.