If you were after a story that captured how a single tech company can help put a place on the map, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example than UK chip designer Arm.
The Cambridge-based company — which was spun out of computer maker Acorn Computers in 1990 — is a central part of the city’s talent flywheel. Since launching there more than three decades ago Arm has grown to more than 6,000 employees across 21 countries, and nearly half of them remain in the UK. It has a strong presence up and down the UK, with offices in Manchester and Bristol; it also doubled down on its presence in Cambridge, recently signing a lease to expand into a new building there.
Arm was valued at $54.5bn when it IPO’d on the Nasdaq in September 2023 — seven years after it was taken private by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and 25 years after it first floated on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq in 1998. Since it re-listed it’s more than tripled its valuation amid a chip boom; its market cap now sits at around $170bn.
After London, Cambridge is the city that receives the most venture capital in the UK. Cambridge-based startups raised €1.3bn across 43 deals in 2024, according to Sifted data. Startups launched there have also produced more than $16.9 for every dollar of VC investment, according to a report from data platform Dealroom last year. That puts it ahead of London and the UK as a whole.
As with all great tech companies, Arm has become somewhat of a founders factory too, with heaps of former employees leaving to launch their own startups.
Sifted tracked down 18 of them (who held full-time roles at the company) building tech startups in Europe. Sifted reached out to everyone on this list to confirm details about their companies. If there’s anyone missing, get in touch.
The Arm alumni building startups in Europe
Serban Constantinescu — Source.dev
Serban Constantinescu spent more than seven years at Arm — first as a software engineer and then in product management. In his final two years there he led the product management of Armv9, the company’s latest processor architecture.
He tells Sifted the experience was pivotal in preparing him to become a founder. “I hold Arm’s culture in the highest regard and often find myself missing it,” he says, adding that he had “a front-row seat to innovation years ahead of its time.”
After he left the company in 2018 Constantinescu spent six years at Google as a product manager focused on its Android operating system. In July 2024 he then founded London-based startup Source.dev, which is focused on the development, operations and security of software for smart devices. Its platform and LLM models quicken development times and reduce the long-term costs of maintaining device codebases. The team is made up of former Google Android, Arm and Linux Kernel developers.
Hao Zheng — Robok
Hao Zheng joined Arm after completing an MPhil at the University of Cambridge in 2017. She worked on and managed internal projects at the company.
After leaving in 2019 she cofounded Robok, which is an AI-powered software platform that uses existing CCTV cameras to improve safety and operations at industrial workplaces. The company was spun out of the University of Cambridge and has raised £3.7m in grant and equity funding from investors including Amadeus Capital Partners.
Donatien Garnier, Dan Ros, Simon Ford — Blecon
Donatien Garnier was at Arm between 2017 and 2021. He was the technical lead for its IoT operating system, Mbed OS, and also worked with customers to architect and integrate Arm’s IoT software into their products.
After he left the company he cofounded Cambridge-based Blecon with Dan Ros and Simon Ford, who also worked in Arm’s IoT division. The company is developing a cellular-like network that allows devices to securely send and receive data through any nearby hotspot, such as phones, computers or hubs, without the need for pairing.
Garnier says that he’s using a lot of the lessons he learned at Arm at Blecon. He tells Sifted: “From an industry perspective, I was fortunate to work on high-profile projects that gave me unique insights into the IoT landscape. I not only saw how the ecosystem operates but also identified key gaps that could be turned into opportunities, including the one we’re taking up with Blecon.”
Blecon has raised $4.6m so far from MMC Ventures and currently has a team of six. Garnier says the company has also signed up its first customers in various industries, including logistics, farming, food safety and healthcare.
Dominic Vergine — Monumo
By the time he joined Arm in 2010 Dominic Vergine had founded two companies, a charity and a non-profit. He was at the chip designer for nearly 12 years, during which he built the company’s sustainability function.
He says the concept behind Monumo, the Cambridge- and Coventry-based startup he founded after leaving Arm, is something he explored during an innovation programme the Arm board put together in 2010 called Arm 2020. “It was intended to look at new sectors for Arm over the next decade and inspired a lot of ideas that are now major sources of revenue for the company,” he says.
He left in 2021 to start Monumo, which has designed and licenses a blueprint for electric motors — similar to Arm’s model of licensing chip design to other companies.
Several senior team members are ex-Arm; Simon Segars (Arm’s former CEO) and Graham Budd (Arm’s former COO and president) are investors and advisors.
Monumo’s raised £13.5m, and Vergine tells Sifted that in 2024 it brought in its first revenues of more than £100k. It has a sales pipeline from interested companies worth £50m, and has booked nearly £1m in revenue in 2025.
Jon Geater — DataTrails
Jon Geater was the CTO of the secure services division at Arm between 2011 and 2012, focusing on confidential computing for mobile phones. He tells Sifted that his time at Arm “definitely helped” prepare him for life as a founder — while there he spun out a startup called Trustonic, a cybersecurity company focused on mobile devices, app protection and connected vehicles.
He cofounded his latest venture, data security company DataTrails, in 2019, and is its chief product and technology officer. DataTrails’s main offering is a data transparency service which uses advanced cryptography and multi-party networks to ensure that important data can’t be shredded, back-dated, spoofed or otherwise tampered with, he tells Sifted.
The company has raised a little less than $14m.
Aleksandra Kogon — TrueSport
Between 2018 and 2020 Alexandra Kogon spent time as a project manager at Arm focused on CPU and GPU performance analysis before moving into a product manager role focused on AI tools. She tells Sifted she was responsible for product strategy, funding and product-market fit.
She then joined Meta as a product manager before cofounding TrueSport in February 2023, which she works on alongside her job at the US Big Tech company.
TrueSport is a London-based mobile app which connects sport players who have a similar level of playing experience. Tournament organisers run flexible sport events — players come and go as they please, play with whomever they want and are ranked on TrueSport’s leaderboard. Kogon says its planning to fundraise around summer 2025.
Jordan Hatcher — The Grid
Jordan Hatcher was Arm’s corporate counsel between 2010 and 2014 — he left the role to become the senior corporate counsel at computer company Hewlett-Packard, where he stayed for a year according to his LinkedIn.
Hatcher is now the cofounder and chief legal officer and COO at The Grid, an Amsterdam-based startup he founded in January 2024 which provides ecosystem data about Web3 projects. To date it’s done an angel round of more than €600k.
He tells Sifted that Arm prepared him in heaps of ways to be a founder. “It was my first in house legal job, and I learned a lot about negotiating contracts, legal operations, IP strategy and much more. The company culture was really good, and I strive to recreate that everywhere I work,” he says.
Nico Romdane — Virtual Arts
Nico Romdane was at Arm for more than 10 years, according to his LinkedIn, and the last role he held was director of developer ecosystem. He left in 2016 and founded Virtual Arts, a Cambridge-based company working on mobile extended reality software.
Karthik Hariharakrishnan — GameBench
Karthik Hariharakrishnan spent more than seven years at Arm between 2006 and 2013, first as a senior design engineer and then as a staff software engineer, according to his LinkedIn. After he left in 2013 he founded GameBench, where he’s also the CTO.
GameBench is a Bristol-based company working on data collection, analysis and optimisation for gaming and other streaming and non-streaming applications. Its customer base includes game studios and publishers, cloud gaming platforms and network providers.
Emil Nilsson — Radar Reticence
Emil Nilsson was an RFIC (radio-frequency integrated circuit) designer at Arm for nearly two years, before he left in 2019 to take up a role as a radar expert at Raytelligence, a company focused on sensors for industry, fitness and healthcare.
In 2022 he then cofounded Radar Reticence, a startup based in Halmstad, Sweden which develops advanced signal processing solutions for radar tech. Its use case is focused on building interference-free radar sensors for the automotive industry, according to its website.
Henrik Ljunger — Sanctify Financial Technologies
Henrik Ljunger was at Arm for four years between 2017 and 2021. He joined as a digital ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) design engineer before becoming a senior engineer at the company.
According to his LinkedIn he cofounded Sanctify Financial Technologies while still at Arm, in 2019. The company uses AI to help financial institutions analyse their ESG efforts.
Heba Bevan — UtterBerry
Heba Bevan spent time as a CPU engineer and processor engineer, and worked in the technical sales team at Arm between 2001 and 2008. In 2013 she founded London-based UtterBerry — which provides an AI wireless smart sensor systems for infrastructure monitoring and smart city development — and is the company’s CEO.
Jakub Lenski — Saber
Jakub Lenski was a software engineer at Arm between 2018 and 2022, according to his LinkedIn. He’s founded several companies since 2021: Afiliatree, a Chrome extension which allows consumers to plant trees for free while they shop online; Ecom Pilot, a product search engine which lets users source white-label products; and Saber, his most recent venture which he cofounded in 2024. Saber uses AI to help law firms automate document processing.
Deborah Murphy — Inclusio
Deborah Murphy was a senior global engineering manager for Arm between 2014 and 2018. She reported to the company’s director of engineering and her focus included ‘leading teams to deliver and support large scale IoT and mobile solutions for global customers’, according to her LinkedIn.
After leaving she founded Inclusio (where she’s the COO) in 2019. The company provides a software platform that lets businesses collect people data and do compliance reporting. It also lets them benchmark things like social sustainability against industry standards and report to regulators.
Espen Drivenes Øybø
Espen Drivenes Øybø spent nearly six years at Arm in Trondheim, Norway. He joined the company in 2012 as a marketing graduate and worked his way up across multiple roles to become a senior product manager by the time he left in 2018.
He then cofounded Embiso in 2019, a company which has created a PDF watermarking tool for businesses looking for better document security.
Virgile Javerliac — Neurxcore
Virgile Javerliac was a senior SRAM (static random access memory) design engineer at Arm for just over four years. Since leaving in 2013 he’s been a serial founder, according to his LinkedIn.
He cofounded a company called Evaderis in 2014, which offers memory design solutions for chips that can be used to lower the power consumption of devices. In 2019 he cofounded Smartnvy, a chip design company headquartered in Shenzhen, China.
His most recent venture is Neurxcore, a fabless semiconductor company and provider of neural processors (which mimic the processing function of the human brain). He founded the company, which is based in Grenoble, France, in 2023, and is its CEO.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/18-former-arm-employees-founders/
