Movidius founders eye future as they cash in chips with sale to Intel

When Irish chipmaker Movidius was bought by Intel earlier this week, it made headlines all around the world. But for founders Seán Mitchell and David Moloney and their staff it was business as usual.

“We were back at our desks in the morning working away again,” says Mitchell, the company’s chief operating officer. “We’ve committed to making sure Intel realises the [company’s] value, promise and potential and we have a job to do for many years to ensure that will be the case. There’s no retirement yet, I’m afraid.”

Movidius can be considered one of the Irish tech industry’s biggest success stories. Amid a string of high-profile deals for its vision-sensing technology, including with Google and drone maker DJI, the company caught Intel’s attention. But the founders have not been cracking open the champagne yet, as there is more work to do before deal is finalised.

“We may wait until it’s actually closed,” Mitchell says. He is hopeful that everything will be signed off long before the end of the year, bringing an element of stability to the company and leaving Movidius to get on with what it does best: developing its technology.

Internet of things

From Intel’s point of view, this is a boost to its ambitions in the internet-of-things sector, and it seems to be throwing its might behind the Irish firm and its products. Management and staff are all staying on after the acquisition is closed. Intel is believed to have paid more than €350 million for the Irish firm, though neither side will disclose the terms of the deal.

“The technology obviously has a certain value but without the team it’s very tough to diffuse that and make the most of it,” says Mitchell. “Ultimately they want to see the fruit of the work having an impact on the world and they see this as great opportunity to accelerate that even faster.”

It’s been a dramatic turnaround for a company that, a few years ago, was facing some tough decisions. Mitchell has previously described the period between the company’s first-generation chip and investing in its second-generation Myriad 2 as “very much a touch-and-go period”.

But the company managed to sign up new investors, and went on to develop Myriad 2 and raise a further $100 million in funding. Atlantic Bridge, Bosch and Draper Esprit all came on board as investors. Mitchell says that was a watershed point for the company.

“It reinvigorated the composition of the board as well,” he explains. “We brought on board some fairly high-profile independent directors as well.” Those new members included a new chairman, Dan Dobberpuhl, whom Mitchell describes as an industry legend with several successful companies to his name.

“We’ve really enjoyed working with the guys over the years. It will be sad in some ways to move on from that,” he says. “I’m also personally delighted when people who believed in us get some reward for having done so. In the end, that’s their business, and they had the foresight to make some bets on the things they believed in. It’s great to see some of it pay off for them.”

It also takes Movidius out of the fundraising rat race, a process Mitchell admits can be distracting, despite the company’s previous success at raising cash.

“It was clear that staying independent as an option was certainly going to require a lot of money,” he says. “Given the way the markets are developing and becoming very competitive now, I think going this route give us an option to accelerate things and take advantage of the scale and reach that a partner like Intel has.”

There are no specifics yet about how Movidius will work under this new partnership with Intel; those details are still being hammered out. But Mitchell says there are plans to continue Movidius’s work and even invest further.

Dominance

“I think it’s going to get very competitive and like many of these things the company that really dominates it is the one that ends up getting something out of it. Second place is barely able to survive. I think a lot of people are trying to be aggressive in these markets and getting to a place of dominance,” he says.

“Intel has fantastic process technology and manufacturing capability, it has tremendous reach and great technology, great teams. Also, I think – not to be dismissed – it’s a company of extremely high integrity. I think you couldn’t look for a better home for the team and partner to help us realise the vision where we think the technology can go.”

He is clear about where he thinks the next step is: dominating the market. In Movidius’s vision of the future, the company wants to be the dominant force in the internet of things, where machine intelligence is key, and essentially become the de facto platform for those type of applications. The weight of Intel behind it could give it that extra momentum.

“This is not in any way an end point,” he says. “It’s a next step, really, the next chapter in the journey.”