August 1, 2025 • 8 mins
Ambiq Micro Inc. shares rose 61% in their first trading day, after the maker of ultra-low power semiconductors for AI applications raised $96 million in an upsized initial public offering. Shares of the Austin-based company closed at $38.53 each on Wednesday in New York, above the IPO price of $24 apiece.
Scott Hanson, the company's founder and Chief Technology Officer, discusses the firm's strong start in public markets, how US tensions with China impact its strategy, and the array of consumer products that operate using Ambiq's chips. Scott speaks with Tim Stenovec and Carol Massar on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Well, another IPO today. Of course, we've talked about the
VC backed Figma. We'll have more on that in our
next hour. We talked about with Carol nineteen percent. A
little bit of volatility too in the session. But talk
about welcome, right, a warm welcome certainly to the private
to the public markets. I should say, just yesterday we
had another IPO, Ambic micromaking its trading debut share short
(00:37):
sixty one percent that first day of trading. It's been
up as much as thirty four percent today's session right now,
about a fifteen percent gain. It's a maker of ultra
low power semiconductors for AI applications. It did raise ninety
six million in that upsized IPO. So let's get into it,
the technology, the business, the outlook with us in studio
Scott Hansen. He's the founder and chief technology officer of
(00:58):
Ambic and as we say, joining us here at Bloomberg headquarters. Scott,
your IPO, congratulations, Thank you you did really well and
continue to do so. In a second day about the
app performance? What about the business in your view, can
you tell the Bloomberg audience justifies the performance and the
reception that we're seeing in these first two days of trading.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Look, I can't comment on day to day ups and Downspore.
I can tell you that I know you're happy. Yeah, yeah, Well,
I can't tell you why investors bought into the vision, right,
and our vision from the start, actually from when I
founded the company back in twenty ten, was to put
intelligence everywhere. Right. It was to take it, was to
take chips, take intelligence and embed it in the billions
of devices around us and in your watch, in your
(01:38):
smart doorbell, in security cameras, and in everything. And in
the last couple of years, it's really been about taking
AI and breaking it out of the data center and
moving out to these same devices. So we do that
by enabling lowest power chips out there, and I think
that really resonated with investors. I think there's this belief
that AI is breaking its way out of the data center,
and in order to do that, you need to be
(02:00):
energy efficient. That's what we've mastered over the last fifteen years.
So I'm taking all of this as an endorsement that
people believe in that vision.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
What's your moat? Because there's a lot of competition in
the space, companies doing and trying to do what you're doing.
How do you compete? How do you make sure that
you actually have a moat here?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
So actually the company was found out of the University
of Michigan, so I did my PhD work there. We
invented a bunch of technology that is now central to AMVIK.
We've got a circuit platform that allows us to build
chips that are two to five times more efficient than
what's out there. We brand that as spot sub threshold
power optimized technology. We could spend the next two hours
talking about it. I won't bore you with that, but
(02:37):
really differentiated and unique platform, patent protected, growing all the time,
and what's really exciting is we now have a bunch
of more money to go fund the ongoing development of that.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What I'm curious about, and we talk about the semiconductor
space all the time, there's a lot locked into semis
and there's different kinds of chips, different types of chip companies.
You know, what is it that makes your AI chips
different from what we're getting from the Nvidio of the world.
The Intel's not the world most.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Of those companies are thinking in When they think about power,
they think about watts and killowatts, right, watts and thousands
of watts. We're thinking about micro watts, so million millionth
of a watt and milliwats thousandth of a watts. So
we're on completely different power scared except that would.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Go to smart watch or glasses.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
And so on and so for exactly exactly, And there's
a huge number of these devices. You know, even the
likes of Qualcom, let's say, Who's who's made it big
in phones, is still thinking in terms of hundreds of
milliwatts and watts, and so we're yet below that. So
a huge number of devices that want that kind of power.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Ten years ago when you guys were developing are a
little bit longer out. I mean, we weren't all talking
about AI. It was certainly in our universe, but it's
not like it is in the last two two and
a half years. So was there a pivot in terms
of what you guys were thinking about that your chips
were going to do?
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'd love to tell you
that I anticipated this right, but I will I will
say this. The company's name is Ambiic. Ambiic means ambient IQ,
ambient intelligence. So it's always been about intelligence everywhere. What
was the original mission and it was it was that,
but it wasn't with AI. AI being this this mathematical
technique that we can use to really achieve intelligence. Previously
it was let's add sensors where there were no sensors before,
(04:05):
Let's add a little microprocessor that can crunch numbers. But
suddenly what the world saw with the launch of chat
GPT back in twenty twenty two was oh my gosh,
we can do some incredible things with these AI models.
That really lit a fire under a lot of our
customers because they thought, oh, okay, these tasks that maybe
were accomplished by traditional algorithms can now be achieved with AI.
(04:25):
And that was a turning point for us. So actually,
we like to think of the company in two phases.
A Phase one was it was really about extending battery life.
We helped a lot of our customers in the wearable space,
in smart home space, medical device space go from a
week of battery life to two weeks of battery life
or four weeks of battery life at some point that
doesn't matter anymore though, right And what they really want
is they want to add more computation, more intelligence that
(04:47):
same budget. So Phase two is really bit about that.
It's been about let's put AI where there was no
AI before.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
A big focus for us, and I know a big
focus for companies that actually build technology has been supply chains.
Given the new terraf regime we're in, we are expecting
to hear from the President at four o'clock today when
he is going to sign in an executive order on trade.
We'll bring you updates from that, of course, as we
do get them. In the meantime, talk to us about
how your business has shifted geographically. Has it moved completely
(05:16):
out of China? What's the status there?
Speaker 1 (05:18):
So if you were to look at our revenue from
several years ago, specifically in our perspectives for the IPO,
you would see that China represented a much bigger fraction
of our overall revenue. There was a point where it
was fifty percent or more of the business. What shifted
for us was a second ago. I said, hey, back
in twenty twenty two, we start focusing on AI everywhere. Well,
as we've focused on applications that valued us for that
(05:40):
that kind of led us outside of China. Okay, so
we still have business in China. We still have a
great engineering team there that works and supports some great customers.
But the bigger opportunities for us at the moment are elsewhere.
It's been in the US, it's been in Europe, it's
been in other geographies outside of China. So we have
some dependence there, but it's dramatically reduced compared to a
few years ago.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Who are your customers? You keep referencing them? So this
great function, I would like to say, a supply chain function,
so we kind of know the input the output. Yeah,
it has yet to be filled it so fill it
in for us?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, Well, we sell to anybody building battery powered devices.
Some names I can mention are Garman, I can mention Google,
I can mention Whoop, the fitness tracking company. A lot
of these companies are building health tracking wearables. We've helped
them go from you know, years ago, it was basically
a glorified step counter. These days they're almost doctors on risk, right,
(06:30):
They're really getting quite good at that.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Does Apple want to work with you?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I won't comment on that we don't ship with Apple today.
That's a tough prospect for a small company to take on,
and so we've really focused on other customers that were
more appropriate to our size. Now that we're a public company,
that's something we can of course explore.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah, so you could scale up if all of a
sudden a giant customer came to me.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And we've shipped more than two hundred and seventy million
units to day. So you go walk around this building,
go walk on around them all, go walk around the hospital.
You're going to see our devices in you. So we're
out there everywhere.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I mean, you mentioned Garmin. You know those are like,
that's that's my world. But you know, you're not consumer facing,
so people don't necessarily understand that that's what that's.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
What you do.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So that's something we could buy. That to me and
I could go to the store and we'd.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Buy your activity tracker.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, go go go buy a fitbit at the store
right now, and that has our chip in it. Go by,
go buy any number of Garman watches at the store
and you'll see our O chip there.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Talk to us about technological growth. You mentioned Spot. We
know Apollo is part of the program as well. When
you look out in your pipeline and your ambitions, what
do you want the processor to be able to do
that it can't do? Now?
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Oh my gosh, that's a great question.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Larger processors, wider market.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, So, first of all, what we've always done. You know,
you hear about More's law, right, More's Law is alive
and well for our portion of the world too. It's
not just the bleeding edge data centers and the mobile phones.
Every year our products, the Apollo product line is our
processor line. They're getting faster, lower power, more integrated. And
so actually, what we disclosed in our in our perspective
leading up to IPO was a new family would have
up and called Atomic and this will be our first
(08:02):
AI forward products. So what we've seen is we talk
to customers in the ar glass space, in the camera space,
in a bunch of other spaces. They want more AI
compute capability on device and we've been doing that for years.
But they have these really grand ambitions that blow my mind.
And so we need to build a product that's going to.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Take us there meta platforms a customer I can't.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Talk about that. That is a great company for sure,
and I would say, if you look at publicly available
information on them, they have some crazy ambitions that blow
my mind. I mean, they talk about what they want
to do with those glasses. Just yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg was
talking about super intelligence making its way out, and I
completely align with that vision.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Thank you so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Come back suonent Scott Hanson. He's the founder and CTO
of Ambic, joining us
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Well, another IPO today. Of course, we've talked about the
VC backed Figma. We'll have more on that in our
next hour. We talked about with Carol nineteen percent. A
little bit of volatility too in the session. But talk
about welcome, right, a warm welcome certainly to the private
to the public markets. I should say, just yesterday we
had another IPO, Ambic micromaking its trading debut share short
(00:37):
sixty one percent that first day of trading. It's been
up as much as thirty four percent today's session right now,
about a fifteen percent gain. It's a maker of ultra
low power semiconductors for AI applications. It did raise ninety
six million in that upsized IPO. So let's get into it,
the technology, the business, the outlook with us in studio
Scott Hansen. He's the founder and chief technology officer of
(00:58):
Ambic and as we say, joining us here at Bloomberg headquarters. Scott,
your IPO, congratulations, Thank you you did really well and
continue to do so. In a second day about the
app performance? What about the business in your view, can
you tell the Bloomberg audience justifies the performance and the
reception that we're seeing in these first two days of trading.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Look, I can't comment on day to day ups and Downspore.
I can tell you that I know you're happy. Yeah, yeah, Well,
I can't tell you why investors bought into the vision, right,
and our vision from the start, actually from when I
founded the company back in twenty ten, was to put
intelligence everywhere. Right. It was to take it, was to
take chips, take intelligence and embed it in the billions
of devices around us and in your watch, in your
(01:38):
smart doorbell, in security cameras, and in everything. And in
the last couple of years, it's really been about taking
AI and breaking it out of the data center and
moving out to these same devices. So we do that
by enabling lowest power chips out there, and I think
that really resonated with investors. I think there's this belief
that AI is breaking its way out of the data center,
and in order to do that, you need to be
(02:00):
energy efficient. That's what we've mastered over the last fifteen years.
So I'm taking all of this as an endorsement that
people believe in that vision.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
What's your moat? Because there's a lot of competition in
the space, companies doing and trying to do what you're doing.
How do you compete? How do you make sure that
you actually have a moat here?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
So actually the company was found out of the University
of Michigan, so I did my PhD work there. We
invented a bunch of technology that is now central to AMVIK.
We've got a circuit platform that allows us to build
chips that are two to five times more efficient than
what's out there. We brand that as spot sub threshold
power optimized technology. We could spend the next two hours
talking about it. I won't bore you with that, but
(02:37):
really differentiated and unique platform, patent protected, growing all the time,
and what's really exciting is we now have a bunch
of more money to go fund the ongoing development of that.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What I'm curious about, and we talk about the semiconductor
space all the time, there's a lot locked into semis
and there's different kinds of chips, different types of chip companies.
You know, what is it that makes your AI chips
different from what we're getting from the Nvidio of the world.
The Intel's not the world most.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Of those companies are thinking in When they think about power,
they think about watts and killowatts, right, watts and thousands
of watts. We're thinking about micro watts, so million millionth
of a watt and milliwats thousandth of a watts. So
we're on completely different power scared except that would.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Go to smart watch or glasses.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
And so on and so for exactly exactly, And there's
a huge number of these devices. You know, even the
likes of Qualcom, let's say, Who's who's made it big
in phones, is still thinking in terms of hundreds of
milliwatts and watts, and so we're yet below that. So
a huge number of devices that want that kind of power.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Ten years ago when you guys were developing are a
little bit longer out. I mean, we weren't all talking
about AI. It was certainly in our universe, but it's
not like it is in the last two two and
a half years. So was there a pivot in terms
of what you guys were thinking about that your chips
were going to do?
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'd love to tell you
that I anticipated this right, but I will I will
say this. The company's name is Ambiic. Ambiic means ambient IQ,
ambient intelligence. So it's always been about intelligence everywhere. What
was the original mission and it was it was that,
but it wasn't with AI. AI being this this mathematical
technique that we can use to really achieve intelligence. Previously
it was let's add sensors where there were no sensors before,
(04:05):
Let's add a little microprocessor that can crunch numbers. But
suddenly what the world saw with the launch of chat
GPT back in twenty twenty two was oh my gosh,
we can do some incredible things with these AI models.
That really lit a fire under a lot of our
customers because they thought, oh, okay, these tasks that maybe
were accomplished by traditional algorithms can now be achieved with AI.
(04:25):
And that was a turning point for us. So actually,
we like to think of the company in two phases.
A Phase one was it was really about extending battery life.
We helped a lot of our customers in the wearable space,
in smart home space, medical device space go from a
week of battery life to two weeks of battery life
or four weeks of battery life at some point that
doesn't matter anymore though, right And what they really want
is they want to add more computation, more intelligence that
(04:47):
same budget. So Phase two is really bit about that.
It's been about let's put AI where there was no
AI before.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
A big focus for us, and I know a big
focus for companies that actually build technology has been supply chains.
Given the new terraf regime we're in, we are expecting
to hear from the President at four o'clock today when
he is going to sign in an executive order on trade.
We'll bring you updates from that, of course, as we
do get them. In the meantime, talk to us about
how your business has shifted geographically. Has it moved completely
(05:16):
out of China? What's the status there?
Speaker 1 (05:18):
So if you were to look at our revenue from
several years ago, specifically in our perspectives for the IPO,
you would see that China represented a much bigger fraction
of our overall revenue. There was a point where it
was fifty percent or more of the business. What shifted
for us was a second ago. I said, hey, back
in twenty twenty two, we start focusing on AI everywhere. Well,
as we've focused on applications that valued us for that
(05:40):
that kind of led us outside of China. Okay, so
we still have business in China. We still have a
great engineering team there that works and supports some great customers.
But the bigger opportunities for us at the moment are elsewhere.
It's been in the US, it's been in Europe, it's
been in other geographies outside of China. So we have
some dependence there, but it's dramatically reduced compared to a
few years ago.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Who are your customers? You keep referencing them? So this
great function, I would like to say, a supply chain function,
so we kind of know the input the output. Yeah,
it has yet to be filled it so fill it
in for us?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, Well, we sell to anybody building battery powered devices.
Some names I can mention are Garman, I can mention Google,
I can mention Whoop, the fitness tracking company. A lot
of these companies are building health tracking wearables. We've helped
them go from you know, years ago, it was basically
a glorified step counter. These days they're almost doctors on risk, right,
(06:30):
They're really getting quite good at that.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Does Apple want to work with you?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I won't comment on that we don't ship with Apple today.
That's a tough prospect for a small company to take on,
and so we've really focused on other customers that were
more appropriate to our size. Now that we're a public company,
that's something we can of course explore.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah, so you could scale up if all of a
sudden a giant customer came to me.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And we've shipped more than two hundred and seventy million
units to day. So you go walk around this building,
go walk on around them all, go walk around the hospital.
You're going to see our devices in you. So we're
out there everywhere.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I mean, you mentioned Garmin. You know those are like,
that's that's my world. But you know, you're not consumer facing,
so people don't necessarily understand that that's what that's.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
What you do.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So that's something we could buy. That to me and
I could go to the store and we'd.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Buy your activity tracker.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, go go go buy a fitbit at the store
right now, and that has our chip in it. Go by,
go buy any number of Garman watches at the store
and you'll see our O chip there.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Talk to us about technological growth. You mentioned Spot. We
know Apollo is part of the program as well. When
you look out in your pipeline and your ambitions, what
do you want the processor to be able to do
that it can't do? Now?
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Oh my gosh, that's a great question.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Larger processors, wider market.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, So, first of all, what we've always done. You know,
you hear about More's law, right, More's Law is alive
and well for our portion of the world too. It's
not just the bleeding edge data centers and the mobile phones.
Every year our products, the Apollo product line is our
processor line. They're getting faster, lower power, more integrated. And
so actually, what we disclosed in our in our perspective
leading up to IPO was a new family would have
up and called Atomic and this will be our first
(08:02):
AI forward products. So what we've seen is we talk
to customers in the ar glass space, in the camera space,
in a bunch of other spaces. They want more AI
compute capability on device and we've been doing that for years.
But they have these really grand ambitions that blow my mind.
And so we need to build a product that's going to.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Take us there meta platforms a customer I can't.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Talk about that. That is a great company for sure,
and I would say, if you look at publicly available
information on them, they have some crazy ambitions that blow
my mind. I mean, they talk about what they want
to do with those glasses. Just yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg was
talking about super intelligence making its way out, and I
completely align with that vision.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Thank you so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Come back suonent Scott Hanson. He's the founder and CTO
of Ambic, joining us
Hosts And Creators
Tim Stenovec
Carol Massar
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