Alif Semiconductor is joining Analog Devices

When we first partnered with Syed Ali and Reza Kazerounian in 2019, most mainstream microcontrollers were still optimized for control rather than intelligence. Syed and Reza saw early that intelligence would move to the edge. But running machine learning workloads on existing devices meant compromising on power, performance, connectivity, security, or size.

Alif set out to rethink the microcontroller for AI from the ground up. We led the Series A that year, when the company was still an idea and a team of world-class semiconductor veterans excited to bring low-cost, low-power microcontrollers into the AI era.

The team made the bet especially compelling. Syed had co-founded Cavium, taken it public in 2007, grown it to more than $1 billion in annual revenue, and ultimately sold the company to Marvell for more than $6 billion. Reza had run the Microcontroller and Connectivity Business Unit at Atmel through its acquisition in 2016 and, before that, led businesses representing more than $2.7 billion in annual revenue at Freescale.

They were joined by people who knew how to build and ship semiconductors at scale. Zaheer Syed had spent more than 17 years at Cavium. Joy Wu helped take Cavium public and managed its finance organization through its acquisition by Marvell. Edward Youssoufian came from senior SoC design roles at NXP and Atmel. Mike Yousef had led a business at STMicroelectronics with more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue. This was an unusually experienced team taking on an unusually difficult technical problem together.

Over the next several years, the need for what they were building became increasingly clear.

For a growing number of devices, sending every workload to the cloud is too slow, too power-hungry, or simply impractical. That is especially true at the edge, where devices often run on small batteries, operate with limited connectivity, and need to make decisions locally. Bringing intelligence to these devices requires compute, connectivity, and security to work together without unacceptable tradeoffs in power, latency, or size.

Alif built specifically for those constraints, bringing dedicated neural processing into a class of chips traditionally designed for control. Its latest Ensemble devices incorporate Arm Ethos-U85 NPUs with support for transformer models, allowing increasingly sophisticated AI workloads to run locally at extremely low power. In Alif’s benchmark tests, an E4 ran a small language model while drawing just 36 milliwatts, while object detection and image classification could be performed in milliseconds.

That is a meaningful step beyond the microcontrollers Syed and Reza set out to rethink in 2019. We continued to deepen our investment in Alif, including co-leading its Series C and Series D. Along the way, the company demonstrated that modern AI workloads could run directly on constrained devices without sacrificing the power efficiency that edge systems depend on.

Those devices are increasingly all around us: in wearables and consumer electronics, but also in less visible systems across industrial environments, manufacturing, data center infrastructure, healthcare, and beyond.

Today, Analog Devices announced that it has agreed to acquire Alif Semiconductor.

Analog Devices has spent six decades building the sensing, signal processing, connectivity, and power technologies at the heart of many of the same systems Alif was designed to serve. Bringing the two companies together pairs Alif’s AI-native compute platform with ADI’s extraordinary product breadth, scale, physical-domain expertise, and long-standing customer relationships.

It is a natural fit for where computing is headed. More intelligence is moving to the edge, closer to where data is created and decisions are made. Increasingly, systems will need to sense the physical world, understand what they are seeing, and act locally and in real time, often within extremely constrained power budgets.

Together, Alif and Analog Devices can bring that intelligence into more devices, across more markets, and at a scale that would have taken years to build independently.

Congratulations to Syed, Reza, and the entire Alif team. Seven years of hard engineering turned a prescient idea into a platform the market now needs. We’re proud to have been there from the beginning, and excited to see what this team builds next with Analog Devices.