A Triad semiconductor company has promoted from within for the leader of its worldwide sales team.
Fresh off the company’s 10 year anniversary and move into a larger headquarters, Guerrilla RF (OTCQX: GUER) has named Paul Stoneley as its vice president of worldwide sales. Stoneley has been with the company since 2021, serving as the sales director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Leading business development, sales and marketing, he will help drive growth across portfolios, customer segments, new territories and verticals.
“Paul’s appointment comes at a time when Guerrilla RF is experiencing strong momentum and double-digit growth year-over-year on all fronts – market, products and technology,” said Kellie Chong, chief business officer. “His knowledge of RF semiconductors, sales and applications engineering and key customers in Europe and Asia will help support our trajectory by aligning the proper resources and talent. Paul’s leadership, relationships and strategic insight will be valuable during the next phase of the company’s expansion and growth.”
Currently, Guerrilla RF is preparing to uplist to a senior securities exchange, such as NASDAQ. Last month, the company, which went public in October 2021 and is traded on the Over-the-Counter Market’s QX tier, completed a one-for-six reverse split of its outstanding and authorized common stock.
Since going public, the company has been hitting sales and revenue records. Guerrilla RF has been pouring money into staffing up and research and development – so much so that the company isn’t profitable yet. But founder and CEO Ryan Pratt has a plan to get there in the next couple of years.
Take a virtual tour of Guerrilla RF’s new headquarters
Guerrilla RF officially moved into its new headquarters, at 2000 Pisgah Church Road in Greensboro, in early February. The company is hosting a grand opening on April 5 to coincide with its 10th anniversary.
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Ryan Pratt, CEO and founder, has always affirmed that he wanted to keep Guerrilla RF where he founded it in 2013.
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Guerrilla RF used a $475,000 grant from the North Carolina Rural Infrastructure Authority’s Building Reuse Program to help gut and remodel the vacant building. As part of the project, Guerrilla RF said it would invest $5.515 million and create 50 new jobs at an average wage of $100,000.
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Delays in the supply chain prevented Guerrilla RF from moving into the building by its original target of August 2022. The delay caused some heartburn and made work inefficient, as the old building just didn’t have enough space, said Sam Funchess, vice president of investor relations. After going public, Guerrilla RF had been on a hiring spree, with a headcount of 73 employees as of early February.
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Across the first and second floor, the Pisgah Church building has approximately 14,000 square feet of laboratory space – more than triple the 4,000 square feet the 12,000-square-foot Pleasant Ridge building had.
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The labs are home to the variety of specialized – and expensive – equipment Guerrilla RF requires to produce its microchips, such as oven racks where dozens of products can run at very high temperatures. Pratt explained that by running products for 1,000 hours, Guerrilla can simulate 10 years’ worth of field operation.
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“Those labs are the closest thing we have to a factory for cranking out these new products and mass production. Being space-constrained delayed a few of our products, and it’s hard to put a cost on that. [Our product pipeline] would not be 50 had we had the space earlier; it’d be more like 30 or 35 and we’d have more released products. I can’t emphasize it enough: a key purpose of this building is the lab, because the more product we put out, the more we can drive revenue growth,” Pratt said.
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The infrared thermoscope, which can measure how hot parts get on the inside, costs about $150,000, Pratt said.
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Pratt said that the total cost of the project was over $10 million, as just redoing the interior alone was $7.5 million. Guerrilla RF worked with Winston-Salem’s architecture firm, STITCH Design Shop, on the remodel.
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For Pratt, one of the best parts of the building is its too-many-to-count collaboration areas. He applauded the work of the architect in carving out these areas, making it so that either the carpet or ceiling differentiates them from the main walkways.
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All the offices in Guerrilla RF's new headquarters feature sit-to-stand desks. All employees will get their own offices, so that there are no cubicles.
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Here, in the auditorium, Guerrilla RF hosted an office draft day. Going by employee number, everyone was allowed to pick their own office according to personal preferences.
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The building's open-air auditorium connects the third and fourth floor and features a 98-inch television.
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The conference rooms are named after car brands – like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Tesla – a nod to the main industry Guerrilla RF serves.
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Behind the auditorium’s TV is one of the building's six conference rooms, known as the skybox.
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Another welcome change from the old building is the massive parking lot out front. At the Pisgah Church building, Pratt said the parking lot got so full that they had to put gravel on the grass out back to allow people to park on that.
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“One thing you’ll notice about this place is there are lots of little nooks and crannies,” Pratt said. “We did that on purpose. We wanted it to be a building with character.”
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Stoneley brings 25 years of sales, business development and leadership expertise in the semiconductor industry to the position.
“I am honored to head the worldwide sales team and be a part of the executive team driving the company’s strategy forward,” Stoneley said. “The wireless, industrial IoT, automotive, satellite, aerospace and defense markets are going through dynamic change and innovation, and Guerrilla RF is well positioned to lead this disruption and scale in these large and high-growth markets.”
Previously, Stoneley served as the sales and business development director at pSemi, a California semiconductor company where he was responsible for driving over $20 million in revenues.
He also worked in sales management positions at another Greensboro semiconductor company, Qorvo (NASDAQ: QRVO), where he drove revenues of over $38 million. Stoneley also worked for another semiconductor company, Murata Electronics.
Stoneley holds a bachelor’s degree from St. David’s University in Wales in the United Kingdom.
