Krishna Rangasayee

Krishna Rangasayee is founder and chief executive of SiMa.ai, which makes machine learning chips and software for robots, drones, cars and other devices that run AI at the edge, away from the data center. Before SiMa.ai he spent 18 years at Xilinx, finishing as executive vice president of global sales, and was chief operating officer of Groq.

Eighteen years at Xilinx

At Xilinx he held several senior roles, including senior vice president and general manager of the overall business, and he grew that business to $2.5 billion in revenue at a 70% gross margin, according to a Unite.AI interview. Earlier he held engineering and business roles at Altera and Cypress Semiconductor, and he holds more than 25 international patents. “I’ve been a student of the embedded edge and cloud markets for the past 20 years,” he said. “I’ve seen tons of innovation in the cloud, but very little towards enabling machine learning at the edge.”

Starting SiMa.ai

Before designing a chip, Rangasayee and his team met more than 30 prospective customers and asked them two things: “What are the biggest challenges scaling ML to the embedded edge?” and “How can we help?” The answers led to SiMa.ai’s MLSoC, a machine learning system-on-chip sold with its own software so that customers can add machine learning to existing embedded products. “We aim to enable AI/ML into these devices and industries, enabling a wide range of applications such as smart factories, assisted driving, automated quality inspection, medical device imaging, and more,” he told Pulse 2.0.