Think Silicon, power efficient GPUs for IoT display devices

Think Silicon has raised €1.4M in total. We talk with George Sidiropoulos, its CEO.

PetaCrunch: How would you describe Think Silicon in a single tweet?

George Sidiropoulos: Think Silicon is the company designing the most power efficient GPUs enabling rich graphics and high quality User Interfaces in every IoT display device.

PC: How did it all start and why?

GS: I was working with Iakovos (CTO) for the Multimedia and Communications group of Atmel before founding Think Silicon. We were part of the IC group and we had a significant experience as “consumers” of deep technology provided by our suppliers. Our ambition was to develop world class technology for the semiconductor industry solving problems we were facing in our previous position. Iakovos had a PhD in graphics so we started to develop the first GPU. The feedback from our customers drove us to the low power domain.

PC: What have you achieved so far?

GS: We launched in 2016 the NEMA GPU Series targeting smart IoT display devices like wearables, home appliances, healthcare etc. Since then, we have worked towards creation of this new market of GPUs for low power chipsets (microcontrollers). Initially it was really tough since a GPU was considered as a power hungry large piece of silicon. We organized several roadshows to customers and gone through extensive evaluations of our technology by our customers in order to prove that a GPU can be small and low power. The fact that we have companies like STMicroelectronics, Ambiq micro and Microchip in our customer’s list shows that we managed that.

Of course before reaching out to customers we have built our engineering team leveraging the pool of excellent engineers coming out of the Greek universities. Our engineering team worked for years to build the technology and in parallel protect it with patent applications.

We also have a very strong advisory board influencing our roadmap and providing access to high-level customer contacts .

PC: How will you use your recent funding round?

GS: Our customer base is growing fast and we will expand our sales and support team in US and Asia. We are also constantly improving our products with new feature and advanced performance/lower power consumption taking as an input the feedback from our customers.

PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

GS: The first goal is to establish our leadership in the low power Graphics domain. Since we are the first company in this field, we are planning to launch new products in order to maintain our advantage against the competition.

In parallel we are enhancing our technology targeting the AI Computer Vision market. Based on our core technology we are building a very low power Machine Learning Processor.

On the finance side, we plan to close a Series A round of investment during the first half of 2020 which will allow us to attack the new market.