San Diego Fabless Startup Gets $6M to Pursue Smart-Grid Chip

San Diego has a new semiconductor startup, courtesy of venture funding from the Bay Area. San Diego-based Pervasive, a fabless semiconductor design company that is focused on smart grid applications, raised $6 million from investors, according to a recent filing with securities regulators.

The startup’s founding president and CEO is Reza Mirkhani, a former director of marketing for RF tuners at San Diego-based Entropic Communications. He was previously an executive vice president of marketing for a company called Integrated RF Devices, and a senior marketing manager at Fremont, CA-based Centillium Communications, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Mirkhani’s profile also describes Pervasive as a fabless semiconductor company with 22 employees that is focused on designing and developing system-on-a-chip solutions for the smart grid market.

Pervasive’s filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission does not identify investors, but it lists Rohini Chakravarthy, a partner in the Menlo Park, CA, office of New Enterprise Associates, and Lip-Bu Tan, founder and chairman of Walden International, a San Francisco-based venture investor.

The filing also identifies Shahin Hedayat, the co-founder and former president and chief technical officer of Centillium Communications, as a Pervasive director. Centillium was acquired in July 2008 by Shelton, CT-based TranSwitch (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TXCC]]) in a deal valued at nearly $43 million.

Hedayat is now chairman of Santa Clara, CA-based Beceem Communications.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.