Krishna Rangasayee

Founder and CEO SiMa.ai

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Krishna Rangasayee founded SiMa.ai in 2018 on a bet that has aged well: that the consequential phase of artificial intelligence would not be in the cloud but in physical machines — robots, drones, vehicles, industrial equipment — that perceive their surroundings, decide and act, all inside a power budget measured in single-digit watts. The company builds the Modalix MLSoC, a machine-learning system-on-chip for the embedded edge, and just as importantly the software stack that makes it programmable, since the historical failure mode of edge AI silicon has been excellent hardware nobody could deploy against. Modalix runs convolutional networks, transformers, large language and multimodal models and generative AI in 25, 50, 100 and 200 TOPS configurations under ten watts, and the company has publicly framed the category as “physical AI”. Rangasayee’s credibility on the commercial side is unusual for a chip founder: he spent 18 years at Xilinx, running the business as senior vice president and general manager and leading global sales, growing it to $2.5bn in revenue at 70 per cent gross margin, before a period as chief operating officer of Groq. SiMa.ai has raised roughly $270m and, in April 2026, took a strategic investment from Micron.

Career Highlights

• Began his career in engineering and business roles at Cypress Semiconductor and Altera Corporation.
• Spent 18 years at Xilinx across progressively senior leadership roles, including Senior Vice President and General Manager of the overall business and Executive Vice President of global sales.
• Grew the Xilinx business to $2.5bn in revenue at 70 per cent gross margin, establishing the foundation for more than ten quarters of sustained sequential growth and market-share expansion.
• Served as Chief Operating Officer of Groq.
• Holds more than 25 international patents in semiconductor and systems technology.
• Has served on the boards of directors of public and private companies.
• Founded SiMa.ai in 2018 and has been its chief executive since.
• Shipped the first-generation MLSoC in 2022 and the second-generation Modalix, built on a 6nm process as a multi-modal, software-centric edge AI platform.
• Raised roughly $270m for SiMa.ai, including a $70m round closed in April 2024.
• Secured a strategic investment from Micron Technology, announced 8 April 2026, integrating Micron LPDDR5X memory with the Modalix MLSoC.
• Launched Palette Neat, an open-source agentic development environment, and put the Modalix system-on-module into full production on 16 June 2026.
• Built SiMa.ai to eight international offices spanning the United States, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Poland and Taiwan.

Professional Journey

Rangasayee’s career began in engineering and business roles at Cypress Semiconductor and Altera Corporation, the programmable-logic company that was Xilinx’s principal competitor. He then joined Xilinx, where he stayed 18 years and moved through progressively senior positions on both the product and commercial sides — ultimately Senior Vice President and General Manager of the overall business and, separately, Executive Vice President of global sales. That combination is the core of his profile: he ran a semiconductor P&L to $2.5bn in revenue at 70 per cent gross margin and set up more than ten quarters of consecutive sequential growth with market-share gains. He also accumulated more than 25 international patents and board seats at public and private companies along the way.

He left the programmable-logic world for Groq, the AI inference chip startup, as chief operating officer — a move from a mature, high-margin franchise to a company attempting to redefine how inference silicon is architected. That experience appears to have sharpened rather than satisfied his thesis, because he left to found his own company shortly afterwards.

SiMa.ai was founded in 2018. Rangasayee’s founding conviction was that the next era of AI would be driven at the edge, inside physical machines that perceive, move and interact with their environment, rather than exclusively in cloud systems — and that what the market lacked was not raw compute but an entire application running on one chip, with software developers could actually use. The first MLSoC shipped in 2022. Its successor, Modalix, moved to a 6nm process and broadened the supported model families dramatically: convolutional networks, transformers, large language models, large multimodal models and generative AI, offered in 25, 50, 100 and 200 TOPS configurations and in multiple form factors, all inside an edge power envelope.

Funding has followed the product. The company closed a $70m round in April 2024, bringing its total raised to roughly $270m, and its board draws in executives from companies including Intel and TSMC. In April 2026 Micron Technology made a strategic investment, with Rangasayee framing the rationale in memory terms — physical AI places extraordinary demands on memory bandwidth, and Micron’s LPDDR5X is the foundation he wants underneath Modalix for robotics, autonomous systems and industrial automation.

June 2026 brought the software half of the strategy to the fore. SiMa.ai put the Modalix system-on-module into full production and released Palette Neat, an open-source agentic development environment — an acknowledgement that the constraint on edge AI adoption is the developer experience, not the silicon. The company now operates from San Jose with eight international offices across the United States, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Poland and Taiwan.

Education

No education could be established for Krishna Rangasayee from any source in this review. Crunchbase records attendance at Mississippi State University without a degree, field or year; the claim is uncorroborated elsewhere and is deliberately not asserted.