Sid Sheth

Siddhartha (Sid) Sheth is co-founder, president and chief executive of d-Matrix, a chip company that builds hardware for AI inference, the step where a trained model answers requests. He co-founded it in 2019 with Sudeep Bhoja, its chief technology officer, after more than 20 years in processor and networking chips at Intel, Aeluros, NetLogic and Inphi.

Twenty years in networking chips

Sheth earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University and began at Intel in the Pentium microprocessor and network processor groups. In 2001 he joined the founding team of Aeluros, a networking chip company bought by NetLogic in 2007, and at NetLogic he led its 100G product line. At Inphi he was senior vice president and general manager of the networking business, which grew past $1 billion with a focus on AI data centers before Marvell bought Inphi, according to his conference biography.

He grew up around family businesses. “Entrepreneurship ran in the family. I don’t think I had much of a choice,” he told the Economic Times, recalling grandfathers who built businesses in 1940s India.

Betting on inference

When Sheth and Bhoja left Inphi, investors often did not know the term, he said; they would reply, “what is inference?” In 2020 d-Matrix shifted its focus to transformer models as GPT-3 launched, he told M12. Its approach, digital in-memory compute, keeps calculation close to memory to save energy, and its first commercial chip is called Corsair. The market caught up quickly. “It happened literally within three years of us starting the company with ChatGPT,” Sheth said.

Inside the company the saying is “Stay humble, stay paranoid, and execute.” He told M12 that “My work is my life, I don’t compartmentalize,” and that he resets by hiking, meditating, listening to Indian classical music, and going to the gym with his sons.