Montreal now has one more head office. The French investment company Jolt Capital plans to invest 40 million to create a semiconductor design company in Montreal ready to take the entire North American market by storm.
Published at 7:00 a.m.
Jolt Capital announced at the beginning of November that it had acquired the intellectual property development portion of the activities of Dolphin Design, a technology company based in Grenoble. A month later, Jolt decided to establish the head office of this new entity in Montreal, which will be called Dolphin Semiconductor.
The company already operated a laboratory made up of around forty researchers in the Saint-Laurent borough, in Montreal, under the name Dolphin Integration. It will continue its intellectual property development activities related to power management and analog signals for next generation computer chips.
The $40 million that Jolt Capital plans to invest in the new company will go toward acquiring other assets in Canada, and perhaps the United States, and then establishing a sales force across the country. the continent. Canada has some expertise in the design and development of semiconductors, but it manufactures very little. It is mainly in the United States that the factories targeted by Jolt and Dolphin Semiconductor are located.
“The interest for us in establishing ourselves in Canada is that there is a certain know-how in this niche, there are good design teams,” explains to The Press the president and senior partner of Jolt Capital, Jean Schmitt. “The market for these kinds of companies is much bigger in North America than in Europe, so there wasn’t really a reason to keep the company there. »
Food, the key to tomorrow’s chips
Dolphin Design does not manufacture its technology itself. Rather, it sells under license concepts that are integrated into chips assembled by existing manufacturers, such as Taiwanese TSMC. In the United States, potential customers include Intel, Texas Instruments and others.
In a computer chip, the management of power and analog signals is quite critical. Computing and memory units are the core components that are usually reproduced in larger numbers to increase their overall performance. We cannot proceed in the same way with energy management: if it is done poorly, nothing works on the chip.
In this niche, Dolphin Semiconductor already has a good reputation in the industry. The next step in its growth will be to expand its catalog to supply more factories.
In a way, the regionalization of semiconductor production, which began a few years ago and is the result of a cooling of geopolitical relations between China, the United States and Europe, represents an opportunity for growth for the new business.
“Dolphin Semiconductor offers unique technology,” says Jean Schmitt. For us, it’s not too costly an investment, and it’s much smarter than investing billions of dollars to directly produce chips, and doing the same thing that others are already doing. »
Montreal strengthens its expertise
For Montreal, it is another string to its technological bow, in a sector promised to see strong growth. Semiconductors are key to several technology industries, ranging from electric vehicles to artificial intelligence.
McGill University and the University of Sherbrooke are already active in this sector. There is also solid expertise in Bromont, around IBM Canada facilities.1. The IBM plant in Bromont is one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in North America.
The Dolphin Semiconductor laboratory in Montreal is already profitable. Jolt Capital, a French private fund with some $800 million in assets under management, set up in Montreal early last summer with the goal of growing established businesses and taking them to the next level, a strategy investment plan that fits with what we also hear from the Quebec government.
Unsurprisingly, the former general delegate of Quebec in Paris Michèle Boisvert and her current successor, Henri-Paul Rousseau, supported Jolt Capital in its decision to move part of Dolphin Design to Montreal.
“If there is one thing in common between Quebec and Europe, it is having invested massively in recent years in start-ups to catch up with the United States,” explains Jean Schmitt. And there, they must invest in the next phase. We must take these companies beyond $50 million in turnover, and to do so quickly, we need capital to increase activities and make acquisitions. »
1. Read the article “IBM Bromont signs a “breakthrough” in AI”
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