A Dayton technology firm is under new leadership amid recent acceptance into a prominent, industry-specific California incubator ecosystem. The program will help further current commercialization efforts in the fast-growing market.
Niobium Microsystems Inc., a technology firm specializing in silicon chip design for application-specific integrated circuits, has appointed Kevin Yoder as its new president, CEO and board member.
Yoder brings with him decades of leadership experience and is well suited to continuing the growth and success of Niobium’s service and product lines which focus on the development of secure microelectronics for critical systems.
“Kevin brings a perfect combination of strategic vision around our R&D efforts and success in bringing microelectronics products to market.” said Rob Wiltbank, chairman of the Niobium Board of Directors. “We see a future where computing on encrypted data becomes truly accessible based on custom hardware for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), making true privacy the norm.”
Most recently, prior to appointment at Niobium, Yoder was the head of sales and marketing at Lantronix, a company focused on hardware and software for IoT markets. Prior to Lantronix, Kevin spent six years at Avago Technologies (now Broadcom) as vice president of Americas’ sales and marketing serving the company’s fourteen business units and supporting the acquisition and integration of six companies.
He is now prepped to lead the Niobium team into its next stages of growth. The company currently has seven employees.
“Niobium has already established itself as a leader in FHE and the market is getting significant attention from both customers and investors," Yoder said. “I am honored to lead our incredibly talented team as we continue to serve our growing customer base which requires innovative and secure microelectronics design.”
Alongside changes at the helm, Niobium announced that it will be the most recent portfolio company to join the Silicon Catalyst ecosystem through admission into the Silicon Catalyst incubator.
According to a Niobium press release, Silicon Catalyst is the world’s only incubator focused exclusively on accelerating early-stage semiconductor hardware companies. While more than 800 companies worldwide have engaged with Silicon Catalyst and the company has only admitted 90.
The Silicon Catalyst ecosystem includes a comprehensive coalition of in-kind and strategic partners that dramatically reduce the cost of development with a network of experienced advisors that coach and connect startup entrepreneurs, helps early-stage semiconductor hardware companies address the challenges of moving from idea to realization while de-risking the company for investors.
“Niobium is a pioneer in FHE, combining the development of novel hardware and software to create a powerful approach to addressing the important issue of keeping data encrypted at all times, and therefore private,” said Nick Kepler, chief operating officer of Silicon Catalyst. “Their team has tremendous strengths, and we believe the Silicon Catalyst ecosystem possesses the complementary strengths to help them achieve success.”
Yoder said Niobium will take full advantage of the extensive array of resources provided by the ecosystem to further its commercialization efforts and better understand secure compute market needs.
About Niobium Microsystems
Headquartered in Dayton, Niobium Microsystems, Inc. develops high performance microelectronic components to enable the secure collection, processing, and distribution of critical data.
Niobium offers the world’s fastest complete fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) accelerator. Through the company’s dedicated FHE SoC, Niobium will offer the first dedicated hardware capable of advancing FHE into commercial applications.
Niobium is a 2021 spinout from Galois, Inc. and sister-company to Tangram Flex. The company has additional offices in Columbus, Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California.
