ICYMI: Ambiq's Low-Power Chips Gain Wall Street's Favor

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0:37This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR Fully integrated, easy to use And built to grow with your business Thousands have already made the switch Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com That's odoo.com Aging doesn't stop And neither should you With Vital Proteins Collagen and Protein Shakes Because around the age of 30 Your body needs more support for movement and recovery On workout and rest days reach for a 30 gram total protein shake or go with our classic collagen peptides.

1:29Help support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints. So you can stay vital, stay you. Visit vitalproteins.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions.

2:03Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.

2:29Carol Massar:Well, another IPO today. Of course, we've talked about the VC-backed Figma. We'll have more on that in our next hour. We talked about it with Caroline Hyde. It's up 219%. A little bit of volatility, too, in the session. But talk about welcome, right? A warm welcome, certainly, to the public markets, I should say. Just yesterday, we had another IPO, Ambic Micro, making its trading debut. Shares soared 61 % that first day of trading. It's been up as much as 34 % in today's session. Right now, about a 15 % gain. It's a maker of ultra-low power semiconductors for AI applications. It did raise$96 million in that upsized IPO.

3:06Carol Massar:So let's get into it. The technology, the business, the outlook. With us in studio, Scott Hanson. He's the founder and chief technology officer of Ambic. And as we said, joining us here at Bloomberg headquarters, Scott, your IPO, congratulations. Thank you. You did really well and continue to do so in a second day. About the app performance, what about the business in your view? Can you tell the Bloomberg audience justifies the performance and the reception that we're seeing in these first two days of trading? Look, I can't comment on day-to-day ups and downs, but I can tell you why. I know you're happy.

3:36Yeah. I can tell you why investors bought into the vision, right? And our vision from the start, actually, from when I founded the company back in 2010, was to put intelligence everywhere. It was to take chips, take intelligence, and embed it in the billions of devices around us, in your watch, in your smart doorbell, in security cameras, in everything. And in the last couple of years, it's really been about taking AI and breaking it out of the data center and moving it out to these same devices. So we do that by enabling lowest power chips out there. And I think that really resonated with investors.

4:09I think there's this belief that AI is breaking its way out of the data center. And in order to do that, you need to be energy efficient. That's what we've mastered over the last 15 years. So I'm taking all of this as an endorsement that people believe in that vision. What's your moat? Because there is a lot of competition in the space. Companies doing and trying to do what you're doing. How do you compete? How do you make sure that you actually have a moat here? So actually, the company was founded out of the University of Michigan. So I did my PhD work there. We invented a bunch of technology that is now central to Ambeck.

4:37We've got a circuit platform that allows us to build chips that are two to five times more efficient than what's out there. We brand that as spot, subthreshold power optimized technology. We could spend the next two hours talking about it. I won't bore you with that. But really differentiated and unique platform, patent protected, growing all the time. And what's really exciting is we now have a bunch more money to go fund the ongoing development of that.

5:01Carol Massar:What I'm curious about, and we talk about the semiconductor space all the time, there's a lot lopped into semis. And there's different kinds of chips, different types of chip companies. You know, what is it that makes your AI chips different from what we're getting from the NVIDIAs of the world, the Intels of the world? Most of those companies are thinking in, when they think about power, they think about watts and kilowatts, right? Watts and thousands of watts. We're thinking about microwatts. So millionth of a watt and milliwatts, thousandth of a watt. So we're on completely different power scales.

5:30Carol Massar:The stuff that would go to smartwatch or glasses and so on and so forth. Exactly. Exactly. And there's a huge number of these devices. You know, even the likes of Qualcomm, let's say, who's made it big in phones, is still thinking in terms of hundreds of milliwatts and watts. And so we're yet below that. So a huge number of devices that want that kind of power. 10 years ago, though, when you guys were developing or a little bit longer out, I mean, we weren't all talking about AI. It was certainly in our universe, but it's not like it is in the last two, two and a half years. So was there a pivot in terms of what you guys were thinking about that your chips were going to do?

5:58Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'd love to tell you that I anticipated this, right? But I will say this. The company's name is Ambic. Ambic means ambient IQ, ambient intelligence. So it's always been about intelligence everywhere.

6:08Carol Massar:But what was the original mission? And it was that, but it wasn't with AI. AI being this mathematical technique that we can use to really achieve intelligence. Previously, it was, let's add sensors where there were no sensors before. Let's add a little microprocessor that can crunch numbers. But suddenly, what the world saw with the launch of ChatGPT back in 2022 was, oh my gosh, we can do some incredible things with these AI models. That really lit a fire under a lot of our customers because they thought, oh, okay, these tasks that maybe were accomplished by traditional algorithms can now be achieved with AI.

6:39And that was a turning point for us. So actually, we like to think of the company in two phases. A phase one was, it was really about extending battery life. We helped a lot of our customers in the wearable space, in smart home space, medical device space, go from a week of battery life to two weeks of battery life or four weeks of battery life. At some point, that doesn't matter anymore, though, right? And what they really want is they want to add more computation, more intelligence in that same budget. So phase two has really been about that. It's been about, let's put AI where there was no AI before.

7:06A big focus for us, and I know a big focus for companies that actually build technology has been supply chains, given the new tariff regime that we're in. We are expecting to hear from the president at four o 'clock today when he is going to sign an executive order on trade. We'll bring you updates from that, of course, as we do get them. In the meantime, talk to us about how your business has shifted geographically. Has it moved completely out of China? What's the status there? So if you were to look at our revenue from several years ago, specifically in our in our perspectives for the IPO, you would see that China represented a much bigger fraction of our overall revenue.

7:42There was a point where it was 50 % or more of the business. What shifted for us was was a second ago, I said, hey, back in 2022, we started focusing on AI everywhere. Well, as we focused on on applications that valued us for that, that that kind of led us outside of China. Okay, so we still have business in China, we still have a great engineering team there that works and supports some great customers. But the bigger opportunities for us at the moment are elsewhere. It's been in the US, it's been in Europe, it's been in other geographies outside of China. So we have some dependence there, but it's dramatically reduced compared to a few years ago.

8:14Carol Massar:Who are your customers? You keep referencing them. We have this great function, I always like to say, a supply chain function. So we kind of know the input, the output. It has yet to be filled in. So fill it in for us. Yeah, well, we sell to anybody building battery powered devices. Some names I can mention are Garmin. I can mention Google. I can mention Whoop, the fitness tracking company. A lot of these companies are building health tracking wearables. We've helped them go from, you know, years ago, it was basically a glorified step counter. These days, they're almost doctors on wrist, right?

8:44They're really getting quite good at that.

8:47Carol Massar:Does Apple want to work with you? Have you talked with them? I won't comment on that. We don't ship with Apple today. That's a tough prospect for a small company to take on. And so we've really focused on other customers that were more appropriate to our size. Now that we're a public company, that's something we can, of course, explore. Yeah. So you could scale up if all of a sudden a giant customer came to you and said, we need your help. And we've shipped more than 270 million units to date. So you go walk around this building, go walk around a mall, go walk around the hospital. You're going to see our devices in use.

9:12So we're out there everywhere. I love it. I mean, you mentioned Woo, Garmin. Yeah. You know, those are like, that's my world. But, you know, you're not consumer facing. So people don't necessarily understand that that's what you do.

9:25Carol Massar:What's something we could buy? That Tim and I could go to the store and we'd buy? Your activity tracker. Yeah, go buy a Fitbit at the store right now. And that has our chip in it. Go buy any number of Garmin watches at the store and you'll see our chip there. Talk to us about technological growth. You mentioned Spot. We know Apollo is part of the program as well. When you look out in your pipeline and your ambitions, What do you want the processor to be able to do that it can't do now? Oh, my gosh, that's a great question. Larger processors, wider market. Yeah, so first of all, what we've always done, you know, you hear about Moore's Law, right?

9:58Moore's Law is alive and well for our portion of the world, too. It's not just the bleeding edge data centers and the mobile phones. Every year, our products, the Apollo product line is our processor line. They're getting faster, lower power, more integrated. And so actually, what we disclosed in our prospectus leading up to IPO was a new family we're developing called Atomic. And this will be our first AI forward product. So what we've seen is we talk to customers in the AR glass space, in the camera space, in a bunch of other spaces. They want more AI compute capability on device. And we've been doing that for years, but they have these really grand ambitions that blow my mind.

10:33And so we need to build a product that's going to take us there. Meta Platform's a customer? I can't talk about that. That is a great company for sure. And I would say if you look at publicly available information on them, they have some crazy ambitions that blow my mind. I mean, they talk about what they want to do with those glasses. Just yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg was talking about superintelligence make its way out. And I completely align with that vision. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

11:00Carol Massar:Come back soon. Scott Hanson, he's the founder and CTO of Ambit. Joining us.

11:06Before you sign off, you tuned in for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough.

11:46Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Aging is real. And so are the benefits of adding vital proteins, collagen, peptides to your daily routine. Because around the age of 30, your body needs backup to keep your collagen up to help support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints.

12:30Available in the classic collagen peptides, collagen and protein shakes, and new Vital Proteins Collagen Sparkling Waters. So you can stay vital, stay you. Visit VitalProteins.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Everyone's talking about how AI is transforming work, especially in sales. While the landscape shifts, one thing remains the same, the thrill of closing a deal. Whether it's a gong or a confetti machine, every team has its celebration rituals.

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