January 26, 2026Actility acquired by Netmore
Read moreJanuary 26, 2026Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) acted as excusive financial advisor to Actility.
January 26, 2026 – Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) is pleased to announce that Paris - based Actility, a pioneer in low- power wide - area network (LPWAN) solutions with a presence across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Australia —along with its subsidiary Abeeway, a leader in ultra - low power multi - technology geolocation, has been acquired by Netmore Group. Actility was supported by global investors including bpifrance , Creadev , Cisco, Bosch Venture Capital, Orange, Eurazeo,
KPN Ventures and Foxconn.
Benefiting from synergies across commercial markets, this transaction strengthens Netmore’s leadership in its primary vertical segments including utilities, buildings and smart cities, while expanding reach into the enterprise, industrial, asset tracking, and operator sectors.
Olivier Hersent , CEO of Actility, commented “Joining Netmore is a transformative step for Actility, our customers, and the market. Our shared commitment to advancing IoT innovation creates a unique opportunity to power some of the most advanced IoT solutions globally. Through our close alignment on values, culture, and commitment to service, we can accelerate adoption across industries, enabling operators and enterprises to unlock the full potential of connected ecosystems. Together, we will make LoRaWAN the default infrastructure for massive IoT.”
About Actility
Paris - based Actility, one of the co- inventors of LoRaWAN® technology and a founding member of the LoRa Alliance, is the leader in industrial - grade low- power wide - area network (LPWAN) connectivity and IoT tracking solutions . Actility’s ThingPark platform, which supports multi - radio connectivity (LoRaWAN®, NB - IoT, LTE - M), powers the majority of public networks and numerous private and enterprise networks worldwide . Through its subsidiary Abeeway, Actility offers patented ultra - low power, multi - radio trackers and comprehensive indoor and outdoor geolocation services. Additionally, the ThingPark Market boast the largest catalog of LoRaWAN® devices, gateways, and solutions available. https://www.actility.com
About Netmore Group
Netmore Group is the leading global network operator for Massive IoT, powering the world’s most advanced and sustainability - focused solutions for utilities, buildings, cities, and other markets that benefit from sensor - connected environments. With a decade of innovation and leadership in IoT platform development and network operations, Netmore continues to set the standard for IoT excellence. Netmore operates in 18 countries and is backed by Nordic infrastructure investor Polar Structure. https://netmoregroup.com
About Connected Vision Advisors
CVA is a US - based Deep Tech investment banking firm focused on M&A and capital raise transactions in markets like semiconductors and IP, IoT, AI, computer vision and edge intelligence. CVA has extensive experience performing cross - border Deep Tech transactions between North American and Europe.
September 30, 2025Summer Robotics Series A led by Applied Ventures
Read moreSeptember 30, 2025Pioneer in machine vision for robotics
Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) acted as financial advisor to Summer Robotics
September 30, 2025 – Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) is pleased to announce that Summer Robotics, a pioneer in machine vision for vision - guided robotics, today announced it has raised Series A funding led by Applied Ventures LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, Inc ., with participation from Solasta Ventures, Naver, and other investors . The funding will accelerate the company's Kortx machine vision platform, which enables robots to operate in dynamic, unstructured environments — unlocking new automation capabilities in manufacturing, logistics, and other industries.
"Our Kortx platform is enabling robotics applications that were not feasible with existing solutions," said Schuyler Cullen, CEO of Summer Robotics . "This investment from Applied Ventures validates our vision and allows us to scale faster. Rick's leadership will be pivotal as we expand our commercial footprint.”
"After nearly three decades in this field, I believe Summer Robotics is building something truly transformative," said Rick Van Valkenburg. "I'm excited to help bring this technology to market.”
The company has already launched pilot programs with automotive manufacturers and is expanding into additional industries seeking advanced automation. For more information, contact Paul Werp at paul@vision-connected.com
About Summer Robotics
Summer Robotics develops next- generation automation solutions powered by its Kortx machine vision platform, combining AI, computer vision, and high - speed imaging to enable robots to perform in unstructured environments . Founded in 2020, the company is headquartered in Campbell, CA.
About Applied Ventures
Applied Ventures is the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, based in Santa Clara, California . The firm seeks to invest in companies operating in the advanced material, display technologies, energy conservation and storage, artificial intelligence & big data, life science, semiconductors technology, data storage, medical diagnostic, technology, software, sustainability, and conservation sectors.
About Connected Vision Advisors
Connected Vision Advisors is a Deep Tech investment banking firm focused on M&A and capital raise transactions in markets like semiconductors and IP, AI and computer vision and edge intelligence.
Deal Press
July 29, 2025Mixel acquired by Silvaco
Read moreJuly 29, 2025Provider of Low-Power, High-Performance Mixed-Signal Connectivity IP Solutions
Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) acted as financial advisor to Mixel
July 29, 2025 - Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) is pleased to announce that Silvaco Group, Inc. ("Silvaco") (NASDAQ: SVCO), a provider of TCAD, EDA software, and SIP solutions that enable semiconductor design and digital twin modeling through Al software and innovation, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Mixel, Inc. for a combination of cash and stock. The acquisition expands Silvaco's semiconductor IP offering into high-growth end markets, including mobile, automotive, robotics, virtual reality, loT, and sensing.
Mixel provides low-power connectivity silicon IP, specializing in high-performance, programmable SerDes and physical layer (PHY) solutions including those for mobile and mobile-influenced applications based on MIPIR Alliance applications. With over 25 years of proven silicon success,
Mixel has earned a reputation as a trusted IP partner, backed by highly skilled mixed-signal design teams and world-class customer support. Its global engineering footprint is strategically led by a U.S. based R&D team, in addition to experienced engineering teams in Egypt and Vietnam. This ensures regional and timely customer support throughout the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.
About Silvaco Group, Inc.
Silvaco is a provider of TCAD, EDA software, and SIP solutions that enable semiconductor design and digital twin modeling through Al software and innovation. Silvaco's solutions are used for semiconductor and photonics processes, devices, and systems development across display, power devices, automotive, memory, high performance compute, foundries, photonics, internet of things, and 5G/6G mobile markets for complex SoC design. Silvaco is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has a global presence with offices located in North America, Europe, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Learn more at silvaco.com.
About Mixel
Mixel is a provider of mixed-signal IPs and offers a wide portfolio of high-performance mixed-signal connectivity IP solutions. Mixel's mixed-signal portfolio includes PHYS and SerDes, such as MIPI D-PHYTM, MIPI M-PHY®, MIPI C-PHYTM, Automotive SerDes Alliance (ASA) Motion Link SerDes, LVDS, and many dual mode PHY supporting multiple standards. Mixel was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in San Jose, CA, with global operation to support a worldwide customer base. Learn more at mixel.com. MIPI® and MIPI M-PHY® are registered trademarks owned by MIPI Alliance. MIPI C-PHYTM and MIPI D-PHYTM are trademarks of MIPI Alliance.
About Connected Vision Advisors
Connected Vision Advisors is a Deep Tech investment banking firm focused on M&A and capital raise transactions in markets like semiconductors and IP, Al and computer vision and edge intelligence.
Deal Press
June 17, 2025Neuton.ai acquired by Nordic
Read moreJune 17, 2025No-Code TinyML Platform for Edge Al
Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) acted as exclusive financial advisor to Neuton
June 17, 2025 - Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) is pleased to announce that Neuton.ai, a leading provider of no-code TinyML solutions for embedded devices, has been acquired by Nordic Semiconductor. CVA is a leading specialist for edge Al software semiconductor transactions, with the team's sixth deal' in the sector and 2nd this quarter.
Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area, Neuton.ai offers a powerful no-code platform that enables developers to create ultra-lightweight Al models deployable directly on microcontrollers and edge devices without requiring any prior machine learning expertise. Neuton.ai's technology allows for seamless deployment of Al across power-constrained and memory-limited environments, enabling new applications in industrial, medical, smart home, and loT markets.
Neuton.ai's innovations include an optimized TinyML engine that builds models with no dependencies, consuming minimal resources while maintaining high accuracy. These models are often measured in kilobytes and can run in milliseconds on low- power chips. Transaction details were not publicly disclosed. Closing is pending regulatory approvals.
The transaction was led by the CVA team of Paul Werp, Roger Wendelken and Sander Arts. For more information, contact Paul at paul@vision-connected.com.
Deal press
About Neuton.ai
Neuton.ai provides a no-code, self-service TinyML platform that empowers
developers and enterprises to deploy highly efficient machine learning models directly to edge devices. The platform simplifies Al deployment by eliminating the need for ML expertise, delivering compact, fast, and explainable models ready for real-world edge environments. www.neuton.ai
About Nordic Semiconductor
Nordic Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company specializing in ultra-low power wireless communication. Nordic's solutions enable the Internet of Things (IoT) across a wide range of sectors, including consumer electronics, healthcare, and industrial automation. www.nordicsemi.com
About Connected Vision Advisors
Connected Vision Advisors is a Deep Tech investment banking firm focused on M&A and capital raise transactions in markets like Al and computer vision, edge intelligence and semiconductor ecosystems.
May 12, 2025Deeplite’s Journey to ST
Read moreMay 12, 2025In April of 2025, Deeplite was acquired by STMicroelectronics.
Deeplite’s journey from its inception at TandemLaunch to this milestone invites reflection—about what it really takes to build a deep-tech company from the ground up, on how innovation actually finds its market, and on what we learned along the way when teams push through tension and
uncertainty to stay true to an idea.
Deeplite wasn’t built for an obvious market. It was built for one that didn’t quite exist yet.
The Premonition of Edge AI
In 2017, Ehsan Saboori joined TandemLaunch after completing a PhD focused on optimizing FPGA designs. Our company creation process with our EiRs demands a creative mind grounded in the ability to spot emerging trends. I recall sitting in a conference room at the TandemLaunch office discussing the challenges—and inevitability—of AI models running entirely on edge hardware, when Ehsan detailed a parallel between his PhD work and what would be necessary to enable that future. Optimizing FPGA designs is a design space exploration problem requiring the optimization of several parameters at once. Ehsan showed me how a similar principle could guide the optimization of AI models, with resource constraints being fed as parameters to find the right architecture.
Davis Sawyer, who would become Ehsan’s co-founder, joined the same year, convinced after an internal TandemLaunch pitch session. Their conversation post-pitch was all it took to solidify the relationship.
In early 2018, Deeplite began its incubation. The goal was to shrink deep learning models so they could actually run on low-power hardware. Their early proof of concept, written in Caffe, showed a dramatic enhancement in YOLO-based object detection on a GPU. The appeal of creating more efficient GPU deployments was significant—it was all the market could talk about—but it was the early manifestation of a tension that would exist throughout the Deeplite journey. Was Deeplite about efficiency gains in existing AI deployments? Or was it going to be an enabling capability for the next generation of AI-specialized chips? Were they increasing efficiency across all devices—or enabling the Edge?
At that time, the semiconductor industry was experiencing significant growth, with worldwide revenue reaching approximately $478 billion in 2018, a 15.9% increase from 2017. This growth was driven by new product categories and booming business across various sectors, but the specialized AI-chip market was still rather nascent. The pull towards GPUs was powerful across the industry.
Navigating the Noise
In 2019, Nick Romano joined Deeplite as CEO, and the challenge to raise financing and spin out of TandemLaunch kicked off. As the company pushed forward, Edge AI slowly started to take space in the conversation. However, the GPU market—loud, hungry, and capital-rich—kept most eyes elsewhere. This presented a significant challenge for Deeplite: they had to find a way to convince investors of the future while de-risking the short term.
More difficult still, the difference between GPU efficiency gains and enabling AI models on resource-constrained devices required two different business models. Fortunately, BDC, Desjardins, and Somel Investments saw the potential for the fledgling venture to play a significant role in the growing hype around AI. Despite the ambiguity in how the market would move, they joined us and injected the fuel needed to take Deeplite to its next stage of development.
Finding Its Fit
On its journey, Deeplite spent significant time and capital chasing GPU customers. People unfamiliar with the nature of deep-tech could see this as a waste of resources, but the nature of finding the right market for a disruptive technology is never a straight line. A commercial strategy requires exploration, because finding an underserved market is not a trivial exercise—by their very nature, these markets don’t appear in the headlines. The problem isn’t well-articulated, because the solution hasn’t yet emerged to make it apparent.
After a further boost of capital from PJC, Innospark Ventures, and Differential Ventures in 2021, Deeplite uncovered a swath of customers who were leading the charge in the AI-chip market. These customers were characterized by innovative chip design that needed software counterparts to catalyze their adoption in the market. “Most companies put all the pressure on the user to figure it out,” Ehsan explained. “But look at CUDA. NVIDIA made hardware usable by building the right stack.”
When the Fit Appears
By April 2024, STMicroelectronics was the leading contender for Deeplite’s offerings. Unlike others, STM was thinking holistically about the problem of edge deployments. A leader in microcontrollers, they had understood that hardware alone wasn’t enough. You needed tight co-design between hardware and software to deliver real performance. “It’s what Deeplite was built for,” says Ehsan. The alignment was immediate. And the purpose behind Deeplite—making AI accessible on the edge—suddenly had the platform it needed. This moment of product-market fit coincided with a broader industry trend: the global edge artificial intelligence chips market was valued at USD 3 billion in 2024 and growing rapidly, driven by an increasing adoption of IoT technologies. Deeplite had found its partner.
An Exit, Not an Ending
For Ehsan, the acquisition is not the end of the journey. “It’s a very good feeling,” he said. “But it’s just the end of the first chapter. The journey’s not over until the technology is in people’s hands.” He’ll continue the mission at STM, helping the next generation of products come to life. The work now moves from validation to scale.
Looking Back
Deeplite’s journey isn’t just a story of success. It’s a story of course correction, creative tension, and the importance of staying in the game long enough to be right.
None of this would have been possible without the ingenuity of Prof. Sherief Reda at Brown University, whose research seeded the company, nor without the co-founders, Ehsan, Davis and Nick, who nurtured the vision through ambiguity and scaled the company. Moreover, this would not have been possible without the investors who took a leap when few others would: PJC, Innospark Ventures, Somel Investments, Differential Ventures, Desjardins, and BDC. These were firms that backed deep-tech in the middle of a pandemic—that takes courage and foresight.
Deeplite marks the first company I’ve personally seen through the full arc—from research inception to exit. You watch many companies evolve, pivot, succeed, or fade. But to see one travel the entire path—especially one born from a deep and early technical thesis—is deeply rewarding. It’s a reminder of what we’re here to do. Not just to fund startups, but to shepherd difficult, necessary technologies into the world. Technologies that require patience, iteration, and people willing to take the long view.
Deeplite’s story continues at STMicroelectronics. And for all of us in the ecosystem who believe in deep-tech as a force for transformation, it’s proof that the long game is worth playing.
Omar Zahr
CTO
TandemLaunch Inc.
April 28, 2025Deeplite acquired by ST
Read moreApril 28, 2025Connected Vision Advisors (CVA) acted as exclusive financial advisor to Deeplite
Optimized Al Models for the Edge
April 23, 2025 - Connected Vision Advisors is pleased to announce that Deeplite, which makes optimized Al models for the edge, has been acquired by STMicroelectronics (ST). Based in Toronto, Canada, Deeplite is a deep learning edge Al software company that accelerates the adoption of Al processors. Deeplite provides optimized Al models at the edge, reducing time to market for NPUs. Deeplite's innovative platform enables significant performance increases on low-cost resource-constrained edge processors. Models are up to 95% smaller, consume up to 75% less power and perform edge inference up to 6x faster than baseline models. Investors included TandemLaunch, PJC, Innospark Ventures, Differential Venture Capital and BDC. Transaction details were not publicly announced.
About Deeplite
Deeplite creates optimized Al models for the edge, accelerating the adoption of NPUs and reducing the time to market for Al applications. The company offers state-of-the-art models, pre- optimized for Al processors along with the necessary tools for training and deploying models into a production environment. www.deeplite.ai
About ST
STMicroelectronics is a global semiconductor company that designs, manufactures and sells a wide range of semiconductor products, primarily focusing on automotive, industrial and consumer electronics. www.st.com. Read more about ST Edge Al solutions here.
About Connected Vision Advisors
Connected Vision Advisors is a Deep Tech investment banking firm focused on M&A and capital raise transactions in markets like Al and computer vision, edge intelligence and semiconductor ecosystems.
May 10, 2023AI: Coming to a Drive-through Near You
Read moreMay 10, 2023
February 21, 2023State of Deep Tech M&A and VC
Read moreFebruary 21, 20231Q23 report highlighting M&A, venture capital raises and industry news in Deep Tech (AI, Computer Vision, IoT & Edge Intelligence, and Semiconductor Ecosystems). In this quarter’s edition:
+ State of Deep Tech M&A and VC raises. Optimism, doom and gloom or somewhere in between? How the market has changed. What part of the market is surprisingly up.
+ What’s hot in 2023 vs. 2021? ChatGPT, SPACs, Supply Chains, Autonomous Vehicles and more.
+ How do the tech industry layoffs from leaders like Microsoft, Amazon and Google impact M&A markets? Are layoffs impacting M&A markets? Probably.
+ What are the top 3 things every Deep Tech company should do in 2023? Hint: Focus on customers.
+ Interesting Deep Tech M&A and VC deals
June 27, 2022Should our deep tech startup raise another round or explore M&A?
Read moreJune 27, 2022As deep tech bankers, we hear this question frequently, since most of our clients are VC-funded. Should we raise a next round of growth capital, such as a larger Series B or C, or is now the time to consider an exit? Here are some quick tips on navigating these important decisions:
When to lean towards raising a larger Series B/C round:
When to explore M&A
What if I still don’t know? It’s not uncommon to work on raising that Series C while discreetly exploring M&A. It is completely reasonable to understand the strategic options available - ranging from growing organically, to raising a $40M Series C, to exploring M&A. Yes, it’s easier to just pick a path and focus on it - raise capital or exit. But often the options that present themselves to the company as a result of a process can often be surprising and rewarding, and require some work to get there.
If you and your board are considering your next steps, please feel free to reach out.
Brent Lorenz is a deep tech investment banker. He is Founder and Managing Director of Connected Vision Advisors, where he focuses on sell-side M&A and midsized strategic capital raises for clients in markets including AI, Computer Vision, IoT and Semiconductor Ecosystems. Brent is an electrical engineer with over 25 years of hands-on tech and business experience split between the chip and software industry and deep tech investment banking.
* Image courtesy of Mashable
