When surfers and skiers strapped GoPro cameras to their helmets, an Ambarella chip did the hard work. It took the flood of raw pixels from the sensor and squeezed it into high-definition video small enough to store and share. Ambarella's chips also went into security cameras from Bosch and devices from Samsung. In October 2012 the small Santa Clara chip designer went public at $6 a share, a modest price for a company sitting inside the decade's favorite gadget.

Video, Compressed

Fermi Wang and Les Kohn founded Ambarella in 2004, setting it up as a Cayman Islands company with its main office in Silicon Valley. It first earned product revenue in 2006. Ambarella did not own factories. It designed system-on-chip processors that handled video compression and image processing at low power, then had them built by contract manufacturers. The bet was that cameras would show up everywhere, in pockets, on helmets, on walls and in cars, and all of them would need efficient video chips.

From Action Cams to AI

Ambarella sold shares at $6 in October 2012 and listed on Nasdaq under AMBA. GoPro's own IPO in 2014 drew attention to its suppliers, and Ambarella's stock rose well above its offering price. As GoPro's growth slowed, Ambarella moved toward security cameras and cars, building chips that run computer vision to spot people, lanes and objects. Ambarella still trades on Nasdaq under AMBA.

Cover: Design: Camera Obscura, from Encyclopédie, A. J. Defehrt. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a camera obscura (capturing images).