14 Hot Startups
FORTUNE SMALL BUSINESS
14 Hot Startups
(Excerpt on Pixim)
January 29, 2003
By: By Jennifer Keeney, Beth Kwon, and Maggie Overfelt
You've almost got to pity the 14 entrepreneurs profiled in the
following pages. Not long ago investors would have climbed over each
other for the opportunity to fund these companies. But great ideas
don't wait around for a sympathetic economy, and neither do the
visionaries you're about to discover. World-changing concepts may be
out of fashion, but who cares about fashion?
That said, as we compiled this year's hot startups list, we did not
relax our standards. We pored over hundreds of candidates from dozens
of sources--venture capital firms, angel networks, universities,
competitions--to find the most exciting, innovative companies in the
nation. Our criteria for inclusion: a truly Big Idea and some form of
institutional backing, either reliable funding or strategic
partnerships. The companies we came up with hail from across the
country and tackle diverse problems, but they all suggest that while
the economy may be stumbling, the state of entrepreneurship is healthy
indeed.
Pixim
Clear low-light imaging
www.pixim.com
Digital imagery is moving faster than the speed of light, but an
age-old challenge remains: seeing in the dark. Burglars often shine
flashlights into surveillance cameras to make it nearly impossible for
guards to make out criminals as they dart about in shadow. That's where
imaging specialist Abbas El Gamal comes in. El Gamal immigrated to the
U.S. from Egypt in 1974 to study electrical engineering at Stanford.
Two and a half decades later he founded Pixim in Mountain View, Calif.
Here's how Pixim works: Most digital cameras capture an entire image
and convert it to a digital format. That can be problematic if one side
of a picture is notably darker than another because the exposure
setting is uniform for the entire image. But Pixim's chipsets insert an
analog-to-digital converter in each pixel, so that every tiny component
of the image will be adjusted for its optimal light level. The result:
much clearer images in extreme light and dark conditions.
Right now Pixim has its lens leveled at the security market, and it has
already signed up some security-camera makers as clients. Sony and
Panasonic are the Goliaths in imaging chips, but Pixim is confident
it'll be the David that can topple them. "We've filed 68 patents," says
executive vice president Robert Siegel, an entrepreneur who founded
Weave Technologies, an imaging company he sold to Eastman Kodak, and
who was brought on in 2001 shortly after Pixim recruited CEO Bob
Weinschenk, a former Lucent executive. "We're selling to the same
camera manufacturers as Sony and Panasonic are selling to, and we've
got the purchase orders to prove it," says Siegel. Camera manufacturers
will start introducing products with Pixim's chips as early as the
second quarter of 2003. So far, investors Mohr Davidow Ventures,
Mayfield Fund, and Mitsubishi are banking on Pixim, having ponied up a
total of $36 million.
