This Entrepreneur Sold His First Company For $750 Million And Is Now Taking Medical Imaging Everywhere
Sandeep Akkaraju has built several companies that have created new baselines for technology and life around us.
During our interview on the DealMakers podcast, Akkaraju shared his journey from starting his first company before startups were fashionable, to buying it back, and his newest tech startup that is transforming the world of medicine. Plus, we talked about choosing your investors and going after big things.
Sandeep Akkaraju grew up in India in a time of great transformation. The British had left and his family was involved in helping the country rebuild its infrastructure.
His grandparents were medical professionals helping to set up hospitals, and dedicated their lives to serving the poor. Sandeep’s father worked on India’s space program and satellite launchers, before becoming a tech entrepreneur himself.
Sandeep spent his childhood playing cricket and music. He hoped to become a musician and found it a great outlet for expressing his creativity. A talent Steve Jobs has said is common among great entrepreneurs.
He ended up moving halfway around the world to be close to the music scene in Louisiana while continuing his studies. He went on to get his MBA from INSEAD, and ended up in Boston, Massachusetts.
In Boston he got his first taste of startups before they became popular and cool. It was one of those little iconic MIT startups working out of a garage. As he puts it, he began pulling the strings of different projects and seeing how far they went.
Next Sandeep teamed up with Fariborz, to tackle his ideas around micro and nanotechnology, and putting electronics on microchips.
There was some grant writing involved, but this was very much a bootstrapped startup in the early 1990s, before venture capital really emerged.
In the mid 90s digital equipment companies in their area were going bankrupt. They saw this as a great opportunity to grab a lot of equipment cheap, and then begin building their own devices and circuits.
They saw the internet coming on the horizon. So, they moved on creating devices that would become the backbone of the internet, such as optical switching devices. The company grew. At the time Corning had the monopoly of all the optical fiber. Their next logical play was to get into switching as well. Corning ended up acquiring IntelliSense for around $750M. Not bad for a first startup.
Although he’s been good at it, for Sandeep, he says startups aren’t about quick sprints to fund and sell companies, but to make advances for humankind.
Before going at it again he decided to pursue his childhood dream of backpacking the world, and did that for a couple of years while looking for a new project.
Eventually he had the opportunity to reacquire some of the assets and buy back IntelliSense from Corning. He felt, and still feels it is important that you own the underlying technologies and platform to do anything. Which is in reality where a lot of the real value is in building businesses.
Yet, having tasted adventure and entrepreneurship, reaquaring this company didn’t bring the level of novelty it offered the first time around. So, he began testing other ideas and projects. He even took the journey with one for a year before deciding to fold it and that it really didn’t have the big potential hoped for.
His next real startup was Jyve. This time it was the mobile revolution that was coming. The Nintendo Wii, early GPS devices and Blackberry had been released, but the iPhone still wasn’t on the market. The world was moving towards motion in digital experiences.
Jyve went about founding the new fundamental technologies to drive sensors and motion capture by miniaturizing them. When they started motion sensing devices were big. They were heavy. They cost thousands of dollars. Jyve shrunk these chips to be able to fit into augmented reality sets and even watches. It has set the stage for a new layer of technology.
Having de-risked the technology, Jyve was acquired by a well known semiconductor company for $60M.
Exo came out of the realization that 75% of the world lacks access to medical ‘engines’. WHO has reported that ultrasounds could be one of the most important advancements in bringing medical imaging to the world, and without radiation.
Of course, just like those first big robots using motion sensors, ultrasound machines have been notoriously large, complicated to use, heavy and super expensive.
It was clear that Sandeep had the experience in miniaturizing technology to make a big impact by making this important technology available around the world.
Just like he has done with other forms of technology, he set about tackling how to simplify, shrink and reduce the costs, so that it could fit on a chip that could be a part integrated into billions of smartphones worldwide.
Not only could this mean putting this technology into the hands of over 100M existing medical professionals in the market for it and needing an upgrade from the stethoscope, but putting them in every home and parents’ hand for even simple things like taking temperatures. Clearly the applications in the wake of COVID are immense and the world is eager for quick change and new tech.
Exo has already raised $100M, from notable investors like Intel Capital, Sony, Rising Tide, Glaxo and Bull Capital.
Listen in to the full podcast episode to find out more, including:
Choosing your investors wisely · How big Exo is today · Why Sandeep says he would tell his younger self to go even bigger, earlier · How to go about an acquisition for your business
