Jim Chapman

Jim is a long time Silicon Valley executive and entrepreneur. He joined Intel in 1981 and spent 11 years in memory and CPU marketing jobs including a 3 year assignment in Hong Kong from ’86-89 as the Director of Marketing for Intel Asia Pacific. After a stint as Marketing Director for the newly formed low end CPU and PC chipset business unit in Santa Clara, Ca. he was recruited to join Cyrix, an X86 CPU start up in Texas as VP of Marketing to launch their 486 product. The company went IPO in 1994 and was later acquired by National Semiconductor. He joined stealth mode Transmeta the low power CPU company in 1997 and lead the “Japan First” strategy for thin and light Notebook PC’s, delivering key design wins at Sony, NEC, Fujitsu and Toshiba. He was the architect of the high profile Transmeta PR launch in January 2000. The company went IPO in November that year.

Jim became the CEO of venture backed NuCORE, a camera ISP SoC company in 2002. He sold that company to MediaTek in 2007 for $70M. Jim worked as a Senior Advisor for Mediatek after the acquisition and in 2010 helped assemble the CPU chief hardware and software architects that defined the famous 6589 “Quad Core“ Smartphone SoC that became MediaTek’s first huge success in the Android market.

In 2012 Jim joined Tessera’s Digital Optics subsidiary. There he was the creator of the mems|cam Smartphone camera brand and begin to work with Colin Kwan in China. Jim redirected the company’s efforts away from Nokia, Blackberry and Motorola and began a “China First“ sales strategy that led to $30M order from a leading China Smartphone OEM at a 30% price premium compared to a same sensor 8Mp VCM auto focus camera module product.

Jim continues to split his time between Silicon Valley and China and remains active with Smartphone and VR products in addition to VC fund raising and China M&A work.