"Our spin-off will follow in Logitech's footsteps"

Amin Shokrollahi, founder and CEO of Kandou © 2020 Alain Herzog - On 17 November, Kandou Bus, an EPFL spin-off, announced that it had raised CHF 92 million in a Series C funding round. This brings the total funds the company has raised since 2011 to over CHF 130 million, placing it in the top five EPFL spin-offs by this measure. Its sophisticated computer chips form an integral part of the race to boost data transfer speed while lowering power consumption. Amin Shokrollahi, the company's founder and CEO, is convinced that their technology could potentially be used in all types of communication systems, including satellites, within the next decade or so. We spoke with Shokrollahi about his vision for Kandou Bus. Despite the pandemic and the ensuing economic fallout, your company managed to raise CHF 92 million in funding - CHF 56 million in 2019 and the rest very recently. What's your secret? It was precisely because of the pandemic that we decided to streamline our fundraising efforts by continuing a third round rather than starting a new one. So we signed up the same set of investors, mainly Swiss, as well as a few others they had brought on board. This eliminated the need to make lots of presentations to attract new investors, which would have been difficult in light of the public-health situation. In 2011, when you were a professor at EPFL, your lab developed an algorithm that transforms how computer buses transfer data. This breakthrough technology was the subject of your first patent. Is that when you came up with the idea for a start-up, with the anticipation that it would take off?