Brad Dunn

When most people hear "solid-state," they think storage. But in Santa Clara, xMEMS Labs just gave that term new resonance, literally. The company just raised $21M in Series D funding led by Boardman Bay Capital Management, with Cloudview Capital, CDIB-TEN Capital, Harbinger Ventures, Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, and other strategic investors tuning in. This isn't another round of capital, it's an #amplifier for a company turning silicon into a new language of #sound and #cooling for the AI era. Founded in 2018 by Joseph Jiang and Jemm Liang, xMEMS spun out of piezoelectric R&D at TSMC and turned what was once wafer-level theory into commercial hardware. Joseph Jiang, a veteran of Knowles, Fortemedia, and InvenSense, leads with precision and swagger, while Jemm Liang, who built Ultrachip from the ground up, drives the engineering with surgical focus. Co-Founder & CLO Wei-Fu Hsu, the former MediaTek exec and IP expert, ensures xMEMS' innovation is as protected as it is disruptive. Their play? A monolithic MEMS platform that transforms voltage into vibration, silicon into sound. Unlike legacy coil speakers and fans, xMEMS tech doesn't move parts, it moves markets. Over 500K MEMS speakers shipped in 1H'24, backed by >250 global patents. The Cypress & Sycamore lines redefine what "small" can do: 1mm-thin, full-range, and capable of sub-bass response once thought impossible in earbuds. Their XMC-2400 µCooling chip, 1mm-thin, fan-on-a-chip, inaudible, moves 39cc/sec of air at just 30mW. That's not cooling, that's choreography at a molecular level. Dr. Chester Hwang, named CTO on Oct 15, 2025, joins to push that curve further. Alongside veterans Mike Housholder (VP Marketing & Biz Dev), Jim Wargnier (VP N.A. & EU Sales), James Lee (VP & Korea GM), Steven P. Bentley (VP Sales), and Martin Lim (VP MEMS Tech), xMEMS is scaling at semiconductor speed. They're already in BleeqUp's AI sports glasses and teamed with Dongguan Rayking Electronics for TWS modules. When OEMs talk "next-gen," they're talking xMEMS-level integration. For investors like Boardman Bay's Will Graves, this isn't just sound engineering, it's signal intelligence. With AI pushing devices thinner, faster, and hotter, xMEMS' piezoMEMS platform sits at the intersection of #acoustics and #thermals, where every millimeter matters. Backing them is a bet that the next wave of #sensorytech won't just compute, it'll feel alive. So what's next? Scaling production, expanding capacity, and embedding xMEMS' silicon pulse into everything from earbuds to AI #datacenters. In a world chasing speed, silence, and fidelity, xMEMS isn't following the beat, they're building the frequency the future will hum to. #Startups #StartupFunding #VentureCapital #SeriesD #AI #Sound #SoundEngineering #Semiconductors #Data #DataDriven #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If software engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.

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scoop:⚡ Nvidia is inviting startups to a private Power Summit next week at its Santa Clara HQ—to talk about the need to get more power to data centers for artificial intelligence. More here: https://lnkd.in/eSNEqapw

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Big M&A news in Seattle startup land as Palo Alto Networks plans to acquire 3-year-old cybersecurity company Protect AI, ranked No. 10 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top tech startups across the Pacific Northwest. It's part of a growing cohort of cybersecurity startups that are based in the Seattle region or have a significant presence in the area. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gfx_pXkS

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This year's SNIA Developer Conference continues today in Santa Clara, CA! Floyd Christofferson will be presenting his session, "Activating Untapped Tier 0 Storage Within Your GPU- and CPU-based Compute Clusters," on TODAY at 4:05pm. The growing complexity and extended context lengths for inferencing workloads in AI projects have added a costly level of complexity to implementing such initiatives, resulting in increasing I/O required to push data back and forth across the network. This leads organizations to need higher performing storage & faster networks to feed the compute clusters, and get better utilization of their infrastructure. In cloud environments, activating local NVMe within compute nodes similarly provides unmatched performance, dramatically outperforming traditional cloud storage bandwidth constraints and accelerating time-to-value for AI workloads. Register here: https://okt.to/1JGrZk Book a meeting with our team: https://okt.to/ZaoMeh See you there! #SNIA #SDC25

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Recently I went to a local mixer here in Sonoma County and did something radical: I left the AI buzzwords at home and just asked people, “How is technology actually feeling in your business right now?” I heard it all: “Excited, but overwhelmed.” “Curious, but I don’t trust the hype.” “I’d use AI tomorrow… if someone I trust set it up.” Those conversations did more for my roadmap than any online trend report. Face to face, with eye contact, people tell you what they’re really worried about: staff burnout, sloppy data, missed calls, chaos in the back office. That’s where AI actually belongs... quietly fixing the unglamorous problems. If you’re building in AI, go talk to the people on your street, not just your Twitter feed. The answers are usually sitting at the bar table across from you.

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I'm proud to share the latest milestone in our journey to close the digital divide—this time in the heart of California’s Central Valley. Microsoft is partnering with Emergent Connext, Inc. and Cal.net, Inc. to bring reliable IoT connectivity to thousands of square miles of unconnected farmland. This collaboration will empower growers with the tools they need to thrive in a connected, data-driven world—enabling precision agriculture, improving sustainability, and strengthening rural economies. Connectivity is a powerful enabler of sustainability—whether it’s optimizing irrigation with real-time soil sensors, reducing input costs through targeted applications, or tracking livestock health remotely. At Microsoft, we believe that access to technology should be inclusive, and that innovation must reach everyone, everywhere. This is what it looks like when public-private partnerships come together to deliver real-world impact. I’m incredibly proud of our team and our partners for making this vision a reality. The announcement can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eKzh7Xqb

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We are excited to be among the select companies invited to the Southern California Edison (SCE) Grid Digitization Summit. From day one, we have been laying the foundation for a truly horizontal infrastructure company at the forefront of embedding controlled AI in some of the most critical paths. An opportunity to collaborate on America’s grid resilience, turning data and models into actionable frameworks that empower field and technical teams to deliver reliable, clean energy, is paramount. Our foundational platform, Lemma, is designed to cut through the complexity of legacy systems, transitioning infrastructure from static, disjointed assets to dynamic, autonomous systems. We believe that securing our nation's future requires a new and aggressive but very intentional technological push, one that demands we build secure, AI-native physical infrastructure from the ground up. #CriticalAI #ControlledAI #AIinfrastructure  #TechforCleanEnergy

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Just finishing Seattle Techweek, and I'm more optimistic than ever! That said, my biggest takeaway: the gap between our ambition and our data infrastructure is wider than ever. I saw founders building batteries, satellite grids, and new biotech platforms. The energy was incredible. But I kept hearing the same story beneath the surface. One team is building climate models but has to replicate storage across three clouds because a single outage could wipe their work. Another are building batteries for food trucks, but have no idea what is going on by their end users. A biotech researcher told me the know exactly where the data lives, but can't get at it because of regulatory issues. These are real world issues This isn't just an engineering headache. It's a drag on the entire business. It's pilot projects that never scale, brilliant ideas stuck in R&D, and egress costs that make CFOs weep. We solved this problem for compute with tools like Kubernetes. It's time to do the same for data. It’s why we’re so focused on moving compute *to* the data at Expanso. What's the most ambitious project you've seen get bogged down by data gravity? #Techweek #DataGravity #CloudCosts #DistributedComputing #Innovation

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The Bay Area isn’t losing its edge, it’s redefining it. BNB Project Executive and Mission Critical Team Member Paul Kivi breaks down why Silicon Valley remains the heartbeat of tech in the AI era, despite power constraints, rising costs, and shifting data center demand. From retrofits to grid innovation to the talent engine behind today’s biggest breakthroughs, Paul shares where the future of mission-critical infrastructure is headed. Read Paul’s full perspective: https://lnkd.in/gSzFh99T

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Had a great interview with Alan Shimel at JFrog swampUP last week. We chatted a bit about my presentation and demo to optimize DevOps pipelines using GraphRAG. 🎉 Here is a link to the video: https://lnkd.in/gtk2zdCB

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In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, UCLA scientists have shown it’s possible to reprogram a patient’s blood-forming stem cells to generate a continuous supply of functional T cells, the immune system’s most powerful cancer-killing agents. https://lnkd.in/eDwzaY3n

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Nice insights here for customers adopting or thinking about #kubernetes. Our Pure Storage Portworx team worked with Dimensional Research to interview 500 experts to understand how they are evolving their infrastructure strategies. Learn more at: https://lnkd.in/gNc57Q6X Venkat Ramakrishnan Andrew Custard Kalyan Ramanathan Stephanie (Rancourt)Richardson

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