Sam Fok

Founder & CEO - Femtosense
Sam is co-founder and CEO of Femtosense. Femtosense develop hardware, software, and algorithms for large-scale, embedded AI inference in everyday consumer electronics. Value comes with scale, as evidenced by large AI in the news. However, scale comes with steep costs in price, area, and energy. Femtosense brings these costs down; the key is locality, which is well known, and sparsity, which is underdeveloped—this is what Femtosense capitalizes upon. Elevating sparsity to a first class principle yields 10x reductions in silicon area and cost footprints and 100x improvements in energy efficiency.

Sam and co-founders started Femtosense in 2018 out of their Ph.D. work at the Stanford University Brains in Silicon Lab, where they developed Braindrop, the first neuromorphic system programmable with high level, dynamical systems abstractions. Along the startup journey, they listened and adapted to commercial market realities. They overhauled from the ground up their intellectually pure neuromorphic research technology to its form today, which is compatible with common AI programming frameworks, all-digital, and practical for commercial application. Sam has led Femtosense through its Series A round, reaching mass production silicon and critical customer engagement with dozens of top tier customers on just a few million dollars of deployed capital. Sam and the team are looking forward to bringing a foundational technology to realize an ever more intelligent world.