The founder chose this place for both startups | The Entrepreneurship Story in the Incubator, dedicated to building a platform based chip enterprise Liberation Daily · Upview | Incubator | Entrepreneurship
Currently, ambient lighting is increasingly favored by the automotive community, but most of its chips come from abroad. Shanghai Taisi Microelectronics Co., Ltd. recently launched a dedicated chip for ambient lighting, which fills the gap in domestic small package automotive ambient lighting chips and is about to be mass-produced.
Established less than 4 years ago, Taisi Micro has independently developed over a dozen chips and is committed to becoming a platform based chip company.
It is interesting that its founder Xiong Haifeng started two businesses in the same office of Xiangchuang Entrepreneurship Incubator. "This not only provides a warm space for us to work with peace of mind, but more importantly, it allows the company to focus on products and business while efficiently handling other affairs that are not so good at."
"Starting a business again in the age of 40, 'only because there is still greater ambition'"
At the Xiangchuang Entrepreneurship Incubator located in Zhangjiang, a reporter from Jiefang Daily's Shangguan News met Xiong Haifeng.
At the age of 46, he has started his own business twice in a row. For a long time before, he worked in a foreign-funded semiconductor company in Shanghai. The challenge he faced in his first job at UT Starcom was to promote the localization of PHS chips, which heavily relied on imports from Japan at the time. Xiong Haifeng and his team have worked hard for several years to develop localized chips that not only have comparable performance to Japanese products, but are also half as cheap, achieving a shipment scale of tens of millions. Afterwards, Marvell, Atmel, and Haisi were added to Xiong Haifeng's work resume.
Looking back, these experiences are all a form of "accumulation", preparing for entrepreneurship.
In 2017, Xiong Haifeng co founded an IoT chip company. In just over a month, the company received a financing of 50 million yuan and the market development was relatively smooth. Afterwards, Xiong Haifeng, who enjoyed constant challenges, expanded from a single communication chip to the field of microprocessor chips with broader application scenarios. In September 2019, he founded Taisi Micro. That year, he had already passed the age of 40, "just because he had even greater ambitions," he told the Liberation Daily Shangguan News reporter.
[It's not about having a product before looking for a market, it's market driven from the beginning]
"We may have been the first in China to propose the concept of 'MCU+'," Xiong Haifeng told Liberation Daily Shangguan News reporter. MCU, as a microcontroller chip, is widely used in consumer electronics, industrial control, medical equipment, automotive electronics and other fields. He keenly observed that in many IoT applications, universal MCU chips can no longer meet the cost, power consumption, and performance requirements of IoT. Therefore, he proposed the concept of "MCU+specialized chips with more specific functions" to customize products for users and achieve differentiated competition.
General industrial sensors require signal conditioning circuits to transmit signals to the processor. Taisi Micro innovatively integrates the circuits used for signal conditioning into the processor, forming a signal chain specific MCU chip, thereby simplifying the peripheral circuits of such applications and saving on conditioning circuit chips. This outstanding technology has created the company's first product, which was supplied to the oximeter manufacturer Yuyue during the epidemic.
In March 2022, Taisi Micro released a 3D touch chip for automobiles. "So far, this is the only car 3D chip in China or even the world that integrates capacitors and pressure sensitive touch." Xiong Haifeng told Liberation Daily Shangguan News reporters that the reliability and human-computer interaction experience of this product are favored by many car manufacturers such as Volkswagen, NIO, BYD, Great Wall, Geely, etc.
Every smartphone has a battery level reminder function, which is calculated by a separate battery management chip. The battery management chip provided by Texas Instruments in the United States has a majority of the global market share and has been in use for 20 years. It is reported that similar chips developed by Taisi Micro have been replaced domestically and will be applied to multiple smartphones in the second half of this year.
"On the surface, there doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between our product lines, but their underlying technologies are interconnected," said Xiong Haifeng. Many pure technology startups usually start by creating products and then looking for markets, and Taisiwei has been driven by the market from the beginning. It first looks at what is lacking in the market, identifies top manufacturers in the track, and integrates their needs into product development.
It is precisely this innovative approach that enables Taisiwei's products to solve industry pain points and become partners with leading manufacturers once launched.
"There have been no platform chip companies in China so far, and we want to work towards this direction"
Building a platform based chip enterprise in China is the vision of Taisiwei. "Starting from MCU chips, there may be tens of thousands of extended products. There have been no platform chip companies in China so far, and we want to work in this direction," Xiong Haifeng told Jiefang Daily and Shangguan News reporters.
For this dream, Xiong Haifeng has always been working hard and has never considered what to do if he fails.
For his second entrepreneurial venture, Xiong Haifeng sold a house as start-up capital. In the first year, he spent half of his time on business trips, and even now, one-third of his time is still traveling outside of town. As long as he is in Shanghai, he insists on arriving at the office every morning after 7 o'clock, exercising on the treadmill for an hour first, and is almost always the last one to leave the office at night.
Just three months after the establishment of Taisiwei, the COVID-19 broke out. It is difficult to imagine. When the company's initial cash flow was tight, Xiangchuang Entrepreneurship Incubator invested in it to help it overcome difficulties. "In such difficult circumstances, we are constantly creating 'miracles', which also inspires us to bravely and resolutely walk forward," said Xiong Haifeng.
"To have the ability to be a teammate of hardcore technology enterprises and win investment opportunities with services"
"We are actually starting a business, but the target audience we serve is startups," Chen Hua, founder of Xiangchuang Entrepreneurship Incubator, told Liberation Daily Shangguan News reporter.
Xiangchuang has also encountered a low point in entrepreneurship. 2017 was the first year of operation for this private incubator, but not a single enterprise settled in.
When Chen Hua reviewed this matter, he believed that high rent was a problem. Xiangchuang rented a house as an incubator, and compared to state-owned incubators, the property cost was higher. Start ups were already short of money, so they naturally wouldn't come. More importantly, incubators are not simply providers of physical space, but should become "solution providers".
"Incubators are an industry worth long-term development." Chen Hua made a decision to choose entrepreneurial projects with high growth value, bear short-term rental losses on his own, and balance business efficiency through investment.
How to judge high growth value? "We don't focus on model innovation, only on hardcore technology," Chen Hua said, mainly looking at whether the enterprise has independent core technology and the ability to iterate and upgrade, whether the localization rate of the track is high, and whether the innovation value of the enterprise can be shared by society.
In 2018, just before Jinglue Semiconductor Co., Ltd. went public in the United States, the company took a liking to Xiangchuang's physical space, but proposed to renovate it according to their needs, and the time was only given a week. "The business building cannot be constructed during the day, and I hardly slept for a week. It was so small that I personally took care of even one power outlet. They were very satisfied with it and moved in the next day." Chen Hua said, and Xiangchuang helped them solve problems such as landing in China. The founder of Jinglue Semiconductor was moved by its meticulous service and actively invited Xiangchuang to participate in the investment.
Tai Si Micro originally planned to land in other provinces and cities, and Xiangchuang and Pudong state-owned assets jointly invested to keep it in Zhangjiang for development. During the epidemic, when the company was facing the most difficulties, Xiangchuang made additional investments. "At that time, the agreement had not yet come into effect, so we transferred the money to our account," Chen Hua explained. With the assistance of Xiangchuang, Taisi Micro has obtained multiple rounds of high-quality financing and entered the fast lane of development. Last year, it became a "specialized, refined, unique, and new" small and medium-sized enterprise in Shanghai.
"Incubators need to have the ability to be teammates of hardcore technology enterprises and win investment opportunities through services." Chen Hua believes that in order for private incubators to "survive," they not only need to provide regular services, but also need to take a step forward, plan eligible qualifications or projects for incubated enterprises, and help them enter the supply chain of large enterprises. At present, Xiangchuang has helped incubate nearly 60 enterprises and invested in 7 of them, paving the way for "incubation+investment". "We will continue to search for high-quality seeds to help them take root and sprout," said Chen Hua.
