CEO Today Europe Awards

www.ceotodaymagazine.com 26 CEO Today Europe Awards 2018 france ERIC BAISSUS CEO of Kalray ABOUT ERIC BAISSUS Eric Baissus, Chief Executive Officer. Visionary business leader. Tech-savvy entrepreneur. They say it is the journey that matters… what a journey into leadership it has been, so far, for this driven executive who has transitioned French-Tech Kalray from a start- up to a scale-up, with an all-so promising future unfolding as a key player in the semiconductor industry. Turning passion into vocation Eric Baissus graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris and the TélécomParisTech in the early nineties. Strong of his engineering degrees, Eric followed his passion for new technologies and set out on a path of innovation. Back then, there was a lot of hype around mobiles, and he joined Texas Instruments which had decided to invest in this new market. For 8 years, Eric was at the heart of TI’s wireless chipset business growth. He led the development of various chip designs and wireless reference solutions, thus contributing to the success of the company as the world’s leading supplier of semiconductors for wireless handsets. The founder, and then president of Texas Instruments’ Wireless Division, Gilles Delfassy, is Kalray’s supervisory board chairman today. “ I always admired [Eric’s] vision, his ability to perceive trends early and challenge the conventional way, allied with solid technical competency ” says Gilles about Eric. Driving high-tech innovation into business This first success story at Texas Instruments was truly inspiring to Eric Baissus. He admired how a technology (TI’s DSP) had been leveraged to grow into a multi-billion dollar business and the number-one market leader. By 2002, Eric felt software was becoming “the” interesting aspect of mobile phones. He founded OpenPlug, a pioneer in mobile software frameworks, co-inventing a technology that provided high-performance, real-time software (FlexibleWareTM). By spreading this technology, Eric built the company, and led it, both as CEO and CTO. OpenPlug had soon become a leader on the market, with products shipping in millions, and Fortune-100 companies (Sony-Ericsson, Intel…) numbering among its customers. When it was acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in 2010, Eric became successively VP R&D Application Enablement and VP Social Com & Innovation. “ Eric had a strong vision of where he wanted to take the organisation. However, it was not just a vision, but a vision backed by a plan, and with the necessary skills and drive to make it happen. When it comes to good leaders, Eric is the full package ” (R. Maher, senior technical director at AT&T). Today, Eric is still passionate about transforming technology into successful businesses. In addition to running Kalray, he occupies several board positions and loves supporting new entrepreneurs on their journeys to success. Fuelling the next generation of intelligent systems Eric Baissus joined in the Kalray business venture in 2014, 6 years after its inception. A spin-off from theCEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), it is a fabless semiconductor company specialised in manycore technology. Eric’s main role has been to turn Kalray from a technology- centric, to a business-driven solution company, and a world- wide leader in low-latency, low-consumption and extreme- computing processors which are at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution. Kalray’s processor family is designed to address the issues raised by new-generation, intelligent systems, such as smart storage servers and autonomous vehicles in need of intensive, real-time parallel processing. By 2020, the commercial potential of these markets is estimated at several billions of dollars (Gartner/IDC). With a new round of funding totalling $26 million raised in June of last year, new prominent actors Safran and Pengpai brought to the investors’ table and a 3rd-generation microprocessor in the making (“Coolidge”), innovation champion Eric Baissus continues to live by his motto, “ driving high-tech innovation into business”. “From the release of our first-generation processor in 2013, with 300 cores running in parallel, to our third-generation processor, we have increased performance fiftyfold (…)” declared Eric Baissus, “By 2021 or 2021, our ambition is to have an industrial solution for fully autonomous vehicles inside a 4 sq.-cm chip.” FIRM PROFILE Kalray is a fabless semiconductor company and a pioneer in developing a new generation of extreme-computing, low-power and low-latency microprocessors. Kalray’s processors are at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution, designed to fuel the next generation of intelligent embedded systems such as smart storage servers and autonomous vehicles. www.kalrayinc.com