Incredible news for an incredible team! Congrats to L-SPARK alum Deeplite, Nick Romano, and the entire team on this news!
🚀 🚀 I’m thrilled to announce that Deeplite has been acquired by STMicroelectronics! 🚀 🚀 This milestone is a testament to the dedication and resilience of our incredible team. By combining Deeplite's advanced edge AI software solutions with ST's state-of-the-art MCUs and NPUs, ST will now offer one of the most advanced edge AI platforms in the world. Deeplite was the brainchild of Ehsan Saboori (PhD, Eng) and Davis Sawyer, who started the Deeplite project in 2017 at the TandemLaunch Inc. incubator in Montreal’s AI hotbed. In 2019, I had the pleasure of joining as the third co-founder & CEO to spin the project out of TandemLaunch into a stand-alone tech company. I would like to thank our investors; TandemLaunch Inc., PJC, Innospark Ventures, Somel Investments, Differential Ventures, Desjardins, and BDC. Raising over $6M in 2020 and 2021 during the heart of the pandemic (without meeting a single investor in person!) was both challenging and rewarding. I am proud that we were able to deliver a great ROI for you! This achievement would not have been possible without our exceptional team. Adding to the founding team, one of my first hires was Jeff McMullen, a seasoned CFO who was not just our numbers guy but also my right-hand & consigliere in this journey. I also recruited Anne Mezei, former head of people at Element AI. With Anne, we hired Marjorie Desriac, CPHR to lead our talent acquisition and launched a recruiting machine that brought AI talent to Deeplite from around the world. One of our first international hires was Sudhakar Sah (Sud), who moved his family from South Korea to Toronto in the middle of COVID (including a stint in quarantine!) to join us as our VP of Engineering. Sud was instrumental in advancing and commercializing our edge AI technology stack. There are so many people to acknowledge who contributed immeasurably to Deeplite's success. On the investor side, I want to thank Emilie Boutros from TandemLaunch, Christopher Hanck, CPA and Shyam Gupta from Somel Investments, Phil Anzarut & Patrick Latour CFA CBV from BDC, Marie-Agnes Chavane& Roland Leger from Desjardins, David Martirano from PJC, Venkat Srinivasan from Innospark Ventures, and David Magerman and Nick Adams from Differential. I would also like to thank our Board, chaired by Stephen Butler, who provided great guidance to me personally during the ups and downs, as well as our other board members Rob May, Arun Oberoi, and Howard Bornstein. I’d like to thank my Deeplite colleagues: Ehsan Saboori (PhD, Eng), Sudhakar Sah (Sud), Ravish Kumar, Darshan C G, Honnesh Rohmetra, Werner Chao, Nikhil Chhabra and Sougata Pal, as well as those who came before you. I wish you all the very best and I know your contributions will be a key driver in accelerating the growth of the edge AI ecosystem at ST! Lastly, this would not have been possible without the support and love from my family and in particular Karen Romano who lived every moment of this wild ride!