While the engineering and tech people were burning the midnight oil the task of marketing the ADE the IP and the eventual AKD1000 boards and raising capital fell to the CEO and Mr. Roger Levinson. Despite Covid-19 these two individuals managed to leverage their contacts around the globe to the extent that despite significant shareholder criticism at the time the company announced a 29 million dollar funding arrangement with LDA Capital ensuring the companies financial viability. As shareholders waited to find out if the AKD1000 which had been through testing and packaging by Socionext would also pass validation tests conducted by the company before installing them on Boards and shipping them to customers everything seemed to be falling into place. In a tribute to the chip design work of Anil Mankar the CEO announced that final validation and testing proved the AKD1000 worked perfectly matching and exceeding all predicted benchmarks something which he had not witnessed in all his years in the semiconductor industry.While all these milestones were being achieved the CEO was keeping shareholders up to date with progress on the marketing and engagement side of the company and over time announced that Brainchip had well north of 100 Non Disclosure Agreements in place with various interested companies and that they had selected from the interested companies about two dozen which stood out as household names, Fortune 500 companies and most likely to bring commercial benefit.It is indeed difficult to know when the CEO found the time, given that after Peter van der Made stepped down from the Board to concentrate all his efforts on finalising the design of AKD1000 all administrative and sales staff were let go, yet he was able to finalise and announce early access and development agreements with Ford and Valeo both well know Tier 1 companies in the automotive industry where such agreements involved these companies paying Brainchip for the privilege of receiving early access to the AKD1000 test boards.In a further coup the CEO announced the appointment of Mr. Rob Telson as Vice President of World Wide Sales. Rob Telson had been at ARM and had filled the roles of Vice President of Foundry Sales World wide and also Vice President of Sales for the Americas. It is interesting to note that with this appointment Brainchip seemed to be confirming that its stated intention in 2015 to use ARM as its model for building its global footprint still was in play.The CEO not one to let grass grow also jointly announced with Socionext an agreement to include the AKD1000 chip as part of the Socionext SynQuacer product offering and also a joint development agreement with Magik-Eye the inventor of a revolutionary 3D point sensor capable of depth perception.Then out of left field the CEO announced an Early Access Customer engagement with Vorago for the purpose of Vorago hardening the AKD1000 chip for space deployments in a fully funded Phase 1 program with NASA. Not long after this announcement the CEO announced that NASA had directly been admitted to the Early Access Program.
BRN Price at posting:
42.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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