MaxLinear

Founding and growth

MaxLinear was founded in 2003 in Carlsbad, California by "eight semiconductor industry veterans." Kishore Seendripu was co-founder, and would become chairman, president, and chief executive. Among other companies, in the past Seendripu had worked on the technical staff at Broadcom. Prior to 2009, the majority of the company's revenue was from the sale of its "mobile handset digital television receivers" which contained MaxLinear's digital television RF receiver chips, in Japan. The biggest customers for the product were Panasonic, Murata, and MTC Co. However, in 2009, the company sold more chips for use in digital set top boxes in Europe, automotive navigation displays, and digital TVs. In 2009, the company shipped 75 million chips to companies such as Panasonic and Sony, with 99 percent of its sales in Asia.In November 2009, MaxLinear announced it intended to go public. At the time of the IPO, MaxLinear’s venture investors included Mission Ventures in San Diego, U.S. Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and UMC Capital. MaxLinear raised around $35 million in venture capital prior to the IPO, spending around half of it. By the end of 2009, the company had $17.9 million in cash. That year, MaxLinear had $51.4 million in revenue and $4.3 million in profit.

IPO

The company held an initial public offering on March 24, 2010 on the New York Stock Exchange . under the ticker symbol MXL. Initially the company expected to raise around $43 million with the IPO, with that projection later raised to $90 million after a last-minute increase in share price by the company. Writes the San Diego Union-Tribune, "shares soared 34 percent on their debut. MaxLinear collected about $92 million from the offering, with its shares opening at $14 and peaking at $18.70 on the first day of trading." After the debut, MaxLinear said it planned to use the proceeds for "general corporate purposes," and perhaps for acquiring competitor businesses or products.

Post-IPO

By May 2010, the company employed 135 people. In May 2015, MaxLinear acquired Entropic Communications. In April 2016, MaxLinear bought Microsemi's wireless backhaul business, adding about 30 workers to its workforce. In May 2016, MaxLinear announced it would buy Broadcom's "wireless backhaul infrastructure for 80 million in cash," in what was its second acquisition for the year. In the Broadcom deal, MaxLinear took on about 120 additional employees. On February 8, 2017, Maxlinear announced the acquisition of Marvell Technology Group's G.hn business, for $21.0 million in cash . On March 29, 2017, MaxLinear Inc. announced it would buy Exar Corporation for about $661.6 million cash. The acquisition of Exar Corp for $687 million was completed in May 2017.It acquired Intel’s Home Gateway Platform Division in 2020.

In 2020 the company acquired NanoSemi for its machine learning techniques to improve signal integrity and power efficiency in communication and artificial intelligence systems.As of 2022, MaxLinear is on the Multimedia over Coax Alliance board of directors as well as Arris, Broadcom, Comcast, Cox Communications, DirecTV, Echostar, Intel, and Verizon.In May 2022, MaxLinear agreed to buy Silicon Motion, an American-Taiwanese company that develops NAND flash controllers, for $3.8 billion in a cash-and-stock deal.