Sol Lipman

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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Elie Schoppik has spent his career at the intersection of education and engineering. He built early ed-tech tools that helped people actually retain knowledge, founded a Bay Area coding bootcamp that trained thousands of developers through practice and feedback, and now leads Technical Education at Anthropic. Despite all that experience, Elie says most teams are using AI wrong: they’re treating it like an all-knowing oracle instead of a tutor. This is why Elie designs prompts, examples, and workflows that treat AI as a teacher, instead of a shortcut. In our conversation, we discuss: • Why relying on AI for “fast answers” erodes judgment and verification • How to turn prompts into guided lessons • Why context engineering is the most underrated skill in 2025 • Practical exercises any team can run tomorrow to raise AI fluency • What leaders should steal from Anthropic’s approach to technical education  Episode is live now — full conversation linked in the comments.

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Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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🔓 New Tool for Transparency Advocates in California 📂🔍 I’m excited to share FOIAFastLane California — a custom GPT I created to help you draft, refine, and appeal California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests with ease and legal accuracy. Whether you're: ✔️ A journalist chasing accountability ✔️ A lawyer or activist demanding public records ✔️ A citizen curious about local government ✔️ Or a business seeking competitor intelligence -- this GPT guides you step-by-step through crafting effective, statute-based CPRA requests. 🧠 Built on the full CA Government Code §§ 7920.000–7931.000 & caselaw 🛠️ Drafts requests, explains exemptions, and helps push back on denials 📤 Accessible to anyone with a browser and a question 🔗 Try it here → https://lnkd.in/gY_w6RK6 Pro tip: After generating your first CPRA request, ask ChatGPT to expand upon it with relevant statutes and caselaw, and then ask it to "pressure-test" the request for anything that might be missing. If you want expert guidance on CPRA requests, or FOIA in general, visit www.foiafastlane.com

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At HOMY Robotics , we’re building caregiving robots to help seniors age in place safely and independently in the comfort of their homes for as long as possible, while giving families support and peace of mind. We’re currently deploying in senior living communities across the Bay Area. If you have aging loved ones or are connected to senior living communities, please reach out at homyrobotics.ai. 🤖💙 Thank you, Adewale Yusuf , for featuring HOMY Robotics!

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Tech doesn’t have to be lonely. SMBs are expected to scale like startups and secure like enterprises—often with a fraction of the resources. That’s why mentorship and real-world guidance matter just as much as the tech stack itself. This San Francisco Business Times piece echoes what we see every day: tools are just one piece of the puzzle. What really drives growth? Clarity, community, and making intentional tech decisions that actually serve the business. Because strong tech foundations aren’t a luxury. They’re what keep your momentum moving forward. https://lnkd.in/epGKeQrE  #SmallBusiness #TechStrategy #SMBsupport 

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Some great thoughts from my friend Neal Bloom🎩 about the critical importance of Founders in the starting and building of companies, and a startup ecosystem in a community. Sometimes we lose sight of this important fact. Service providers, non-profits, Angel investor, and venture capitalists are here to service the startup companies, and they are anchored by founders. He references a great book written by Brad Feld, “Startup Communities”. For those that don’t know, Brad is an entrepreneur, author, blogger, and venture capitalist at Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado, a firm he started with partners Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson. #sandiego #startups #venturecapital

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A few weeks ago, we spent time in the San Francisco Bay Area meeting founders, operators, and investors who are building at the frontlines of this shift. Across conversations with people like Aliisa Rosenthal, former Sales Head at OpenAI, Emily Cohen, Head of Operations at Cognition, Malte Ubl the CTO at Vercel, and Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital, one theme kept coming up in operating discussions: The real AI advantage is not intelligence. It is reliability. Teams are no longer asking, “Can AI do this task?” They are asking, “Can this system run every day, without supervision, and still deliver predictable outcomes?” That shift changes how products are built. In many of these companies, the conversation has already moved beyond models and prompts. The focus is now on: • How decisions flow across systems • How data moves in real time between teams • How errors are caught before they become operational problems • How workflows keep running even when conditions change In other words - AI is becoming part of the operating layer, not an add-on feature. That lens resonated strongly with me because construction has always been an execution-heavy industry. If you’ve spent time on live sites, you know the challenge isn’t a lack of effort or intent. Contractors, engineers, and site teams are professionals who manage enormous complexity every day. The friction usually comes from systems that don’t reflect how projects actually run - fragmented information, delayed visibility, and decisions that arrive too late. Small gaps compound quickly: • A material delay turns into idle labour • A missed update turns into rework • A cash timing mismatch turns into project stress None of these are intelligence problems. They are system coordination problems. What I saw in the Bay Area conversations was a clear direction: AI is being used to close these coordination gaps: quietly, consistently, and at scale. Not as a mere feature. As operational infrastructure. Over the past few months, we’ve been taking these ideas and pressure-testing them against the realities of the Indian construction ecosystem: across projects, teams, and workflows that run every single day. The goal is simple: - Build systems that reduce surprises - Improve predictability, and - Help teams focus on execution instead of firefighting On Thursday, we will share the next step in that journey for Powerplay. More soon.

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