Today Impinj celebrated the 10-year anniversary of their IPO, and we want to acknowledge what an incredible journey they’ve had. Madrona is honored to have been actively partnering with Impinj since their beginning, back in 2000.
The two founders of Impinj are Carver Mead of Caltech and Chris Diorio (his PhD student), who was at the University of Washington when the company was founded. Carver Mead is perhaps the most consequential technologist of the last 60 years. He coined the term “Moore’s Law,” and that is just one of many seminal contributions to technology and to society writ large. Carver’s work provided the technical and business justification, and the blueprints, for the creation of the global fabless semiconductor industry, including the founding of TSMC. He was also a founding member of Intel, though he never left the Caltech faculty. Carver is also the father of neuromorphic computing, which is enjoying something of a renaissance these days given everything happening in AI and machine learning. Additionally, Carver was a founder of Synaptics, which did many things including inventing and shipping the first laptop touchpad.
Neuromorphic computing is where Chris came into the picture. He already had a master’s degree in EE from Caltech when he returned in 1992 to work on his PhD with Carver on brain-inspired circuits and computation. The idea for Impinj came directly out of Chris and Carver’s work in the mid-1990s: very small, low-power, field-tunable transistors that carried the important benefit of being very low cost. After completing his PhD, Chris moved to Seattle to join the faculty of the University of Washington. Some years later, Carver also made his way to the Pacific Northwest.
When Chris and Carver were looking for their first venture capital round in 2000, they had many Silicon Valley VC firms offering to give them money, given Carver’s prominence. We like to think Madrona was already a successful, quality VC firm at the time, but we were only five years old and did not yet have a national reputation, despite being a founding investor in Amazon.com. Tom Alberg, one of our founding partners, was on Amazon’s board from the very beginning until his retirement 23 years later. And if you think back to 2000, the dot-com bubble had burst in March, the Nasdaq eventually lost roughly 80% of its value, and many thought even Amazon would not survive.
Enter Ed Lazowska. Ed needs no introduction. He has been a Seattle institution for decades and a mentor to so many of us, including Tim and Patrick. A senior professor and former head of the Computer Science department at the University of Washington, Ed is a well-known computer scientist internationally, a force of nature, and a remarkable networker who has always had a deep interest in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship. In 2000, he was already old friends with Carver and new friends with Chris.
Ed advised Chris and Carver to consider “Seattle money” for Impinj, and in particular suggested they talk with two local firms: Madrona and ARCH. We were all very close at that time – in fact Madrona and ARCH shared the same office space on the 37th floor of the old Key Bank building. Ed introduced Impinj to us, and having Ed give the thumbs up and validation to Carver and Chris made all the difference in the world in terms of competing against ‘famous’ Silicon Valley VCs. In true collaborative fashion, Tom and Bob Nelsen (ARCH co-founder) walked down the hall to chat with each other and said “let’s look at this together and hopefully build a great semiconductor company in Seattle!”
The deal closed in the summer of 2000: a $15M round at a $40M post-money valuation, with Madrona and ARCH each investing $7.5M. That was a huge number back then for relatively small funds; with inflation, $7.5M in 2000 is roughly $15M in 2026 dollars.
The initial board of directors was Carver, Chris, Tom Alberg, and Patrick. At the time, Tom was serving on just two boards — Amazon and Impinj — and Patrick, newer to the game, was pinching himself to be sitting alongside such luminaries. Tom and Carver are wonderful mentors who always helped younger folks reach their potential. The Seattle connection continued a few years later when Steve Arnold, founder of Polaris Ventures, led the subsequent round, took a board seat, and stayed on through the IPO.
So what was the business plan back in 2000? Amazingly, there was no mention of RFID, and it was not until two years later that Impinj started moving in that direction. There is a lesson there. When you have a truly powerful, groundbreaking deep technology, it behooves you to wander the product-market fit wilderness for a while, even when that is unsettling and downright frightening, and even when it runs contrary to what you learn in a VC class in business school.
Impinj was in no way a straight line to success. We used to joke that the RFID industry was one to two years away for over a decade. Use cases, lead customers, and some of the Impinj team changed over time, but the core vision never varied. The technology kept improving. Tag prices continued to drop, reader technology improved drastically, and the industry gradually matured. The “internet of things” became a thing. Retailers started thinking hard about how to enable true multichannel retail, and they realized that a core component was detailed knowledge of real-time inventory wherever it resided. High-value items, from chips to airplane baggage to handbags, made sense to build with RFID in order to track them and validate authenticity. All of these forces made the IPO possible, but it was still very difficult.
Impinj first filed to go public in 2011, only to cancel the plan in the summer of 2012, raising $21M privately instead — not much more than the original round. When the IPO finally happened in 2016, the company raised just $77M and priced at a market cap of just over $250M, closing its first day of trading north of $300M. Impinj had less than $100M of trailing revenue and had only just become profitable. An IPO that small is unheard of in today’s markets. That it happened at all owes a great deal to Tom Alberg. Still on the board, Tom made the unusual and generous decision to invest $500,000 of his own capital in the offering — Madrona’s 1999 Fund II was long out of available capital by then. That personal endorsement and conviction helped propel the IPO across the line. Today Impinj trades at a roughly $4.2B market cap — more than 10x in 10 years. Beyond just the IPO, Impinj owes a great deal to Tom’s long-term vision, patient wisdom, and consistent urging to “think big.” Tim learned an incredible amount shadowing Tom on the Impinj board for those 8+ years, and the experience was a highlight of his career.
Throughout this long journey, Impinj did a consistently good job of expanding its syndicate of investors. In the early years, the company attracted strategic investors such as Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Mobius, AllianceBernstein, UPS, and Unilever. Even though not every round came at a higher valuation, new and value-added groups kept coming aboard. The RFID market took significantly longer to materialize than anyone originally anticipated, though the founders were eventually proven right, and without the long-term commitment of a deep-pocketed syndicate, Impinj surely would have gone out of business long before realizing its potential.
Chris is such an amazing founder, CEO, entrepreneur, and human being. He has tremendous energy and is one of the very few founder-CEOs still leading their company 26 years later. He brings a rare mix of excellence, hard work, integrity, brilliance, creativity, humor, and emotional intelligence. He is a caring person and still relentlessly hard-driving, and he gets the most out of the people around him.
Chris is also deeply humble, and he will be the first to tell you that Impinj’s success is not about him, it is about the team. Our response is always the same: Chris recruited, hired, inspired, and taught that team. It is true that Impinj has had a great team from the very beginning. There are far too many people to list here, but a few of the obvious ones are first-CEO Bill Colleran, CTO Todd Humes, CFO Evan Fein (who was heroic through the whole IPO process), COO Eric Brodersen, and Peter van Oppen, who came on the Board at a critical time and helped lead the company through the IPO and beyond.
Bob Nelsen and Tom Alberg were right. It did become a new industry.
For more on this exciting story, check out GeekWire’s feature on Impinj at this 10-year milestone.
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