Jerry Chen, CEO and Founder of Upbeat Technology, received his Master of Science in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin. Started working as an IC design engineer in Silicon Valley at Intel, Lucent, Apple, and Procket Network since 1995. Later transitioned into Technical Marketing roles, serving as Director of Marketing and VP Marketing at Inphi/Marvell and Genesys Logic. His expertise is in areas such as CPU architecture, Chipsets, high-speed SerDes, image processing, and CNN architecture.
In 2011, he served as BU Head at Genesys Logic, leading the team to design image-processing ICs and successfully penetrating Tier 1 brands such as Google, achieving monthly shipments exceeding 1 million units. Subsequently, he returned to Taiwan to establish Upbeat Technology, successfully raising more than USD$20 million in funding since 2021. The products include ultra-low-power RISC-V SoCs and MEMS Bone Conduction Microphones. By 2023, the products have successfully entered Tier 1 brands in the US and Japan. Jerry holds over ten patents and has presented papers at ISSCC and IEEE MEMS conferences.
Tell us about your company?
Upbeat Technology was founded with a simple belief: the future of edge AI depends on dramatically improving both sensing and power efficiency.
Since our founding in 2017, we have focused on developing technologies that enable devices to continuously sense, understand, and respond to their environment while consuming only a fraction of the power required by conventional solutions.
Our innovation spans two core technology areas. The first is advanced MEMS vibration sensing, including our bone-conduction and contact vibration microphones that capture signals traditional microphones often miss. The second is ultra-low-power AI processing based on RISC-V architectures with integrated AI acceleration.
By combining sensing and intelligence, we help customers build always-on devices that can perform sophisticated AI processing directly at the edge without relying on constant cloud connectivity.
Today our solutions support applications ranging from wearables, smart glasses, and voice-enabled devices to industrial monitoring, drones, robotics, and next-generation IoT systems.
What problems are you solving?
The industry faces a growing challenge. Devices are expected to become smarter and more capable, yet battery life remains one of the biggest constraints.
Many edge AI systems struggle because they were designed around traditional processing architectures that consume too much power for always-on operation. At the same time, conventional sensors often fail to capture the rich data needed to support advanced AI applications.
At Upbeat, we address both challenges simultaneously.
Our MEMS vibration sensing technology can capture valuable information in environments where traditional sensors struggle, while our ultra-low-power AI SoCs enable continuous local processing without significantly impacting battery life.
The result is a new generation of intelligent devices that can operate longer, respond faster, improve privacy, and reduce dependence on cloud resources.
What application areas are your strongest?
Our technology is strongest in applications where ultra-low power operation and intelligent sensing are essential.
We see particularly strong momentum in drones and robotics, especially in dexterous hand tactile sensing. Our miniature yet highly sensitive vibration sensors enable robots to better perceive touch and interaction, which is driving significant interest. At the same time, our drone controller boards are gaining meaningful traction in the market.
In consumer electronics, we support a range of devices including smart glasses, hearables, voice recorders, and AI-enabled wearables. Our bone-conduction and vibration sensing technologies enable clearer signal capture, even in noisy environments, enhancing overall user experience.
On the industrial side, our combination of vibration sensing and edge AI enables predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, anomaly detection, and condition-based monitoring—helping customers improve reliability and reduce downtime.
We are also seeing growing interest in healthcare devices and broader AIoT applications, where systems must remain continuously aware of their environment while operating within strict power constraints.
What keeps your customers up at night?
Most of our customers are trying to balance three competing priorities: performance, power consumption, and product cost.
They want more intelligence at the edge, but they cannot sacrifice battery life. They want richer sensor data, but they need compact form factors. They want AI capabilities, but they must control system complexity and cost.
Many companies discover that adding AI functionality quickly creates power and thermal challenges that limit product viability.
Our role is to help customers overcome those constraints by providing technologies that enable always-on sensing and intelligence without compromising battery life or user experience.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
Many companies offer sensors. Others offer AI processors. Very few develop both technologies with a common architecture designed specifically for always-on intelligence.
Our differentiation begins with sensing. We have invested heavily in MEMS vibration and bone-conduction technologies that provide unique signal acquisition capabilities for both consumer and industrial applications.
We complement that sensing expertise with ultra-low-power AI SoCs built around advanced RISC-V architectures, integrated AI acceleration, DSP functionality, Compute-in-Memory, and near-threshold computing techniques.
This combination allows customers to deploy intelligent edge systems that achieve higher levels of performance while consuming significantly less power.
Perhaps most importantly, we view sensing and intelligence as a single system challenge rather than two separate components. That perspective has guided our technology development from the beginning.
What new technologies are you working on?
We continue to advance both our sensing and AI computing platforms.
On the sensing side, we are expanding the capabilities of our MEMS vibration technologies to support new use cases across wearables, industrial systems, drones, robotics, and AI-enabled devices.
On the compute side, we are enhancing our ultra-low-power AI architecture to support increasingly sophisticated edge AI workloads while maintaining exceptional power efficiency.
We are also exploring next-generation approaches such as compute-in-memory technologies that have the potential to further reduce power consumption for complex Neural Network computations and enable new classes of always-on intelligent systems.
Our long-term vision is to make continuous intelligence practical for billions of connected devices.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Most customers begin with a specific challenge—whether it is extending battery life, improving sensor performance, enabling edge AI, or reducing overall system complexity.
We work closely with customers to understand the application requirements and identify the right combination of sensing and processing technologies.
Because we develop both sensor and AI computing technologies, we can often help customers optimize their entire system architecture rather than simply supplying a component.
This collaborative approach allows customers to accelerate development, reduce risk, and bring differentiated products to market more quickly.
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