Quantenna bet that Wi-Fi could carry high-definition video through the walls of a house and replace the cables. Its chipsets used many antennas at once to send more data and reach farther. Cable and telecom companies put them in the gateways and set-top boxes they handed to customers. When Quantenna filed to go public in 2016, video streaming was pushing home networks hard. Faster Wi-Fi had become a selling point.

A Stanford Professor's Antennas

Behrooz Rezvani and Stanford professor Andrea Goldsmith founded Quantenna in 2006. Goldsmith was an expert in wireless theory. Early on, the company focused on an antenna method called MIMO, which uses several antennas at once. Quantenna shipped some of the first chips for each new Wi-Fi standard. Its chips reached homes inside the gear that service providers gave their customers.

Bought by ON Semiconductor

Quantenna priced at $16 a share in October 2016. It grew with the arrival of faster Wi-Fi standards and won major service provider customers around the world, which used its chips in gateways and extenders. In 2019 ON Semiconductor bought Quantenna for about $1.07 billion in cash. The deal added Wi-Fi to ON's line of chips and gave it a foothold in home and enterprise wireless.

Cover: Kites of Fukuroi and Distant View of Akiba in Totomi Province (Enshu Akiba enkei Fukuroi tako), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho hyakkei)", Utagawa Hiroshige II (Shigenobu). Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for kites in the sky (signals through the air).