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Tech’s Best Young Entrepreneurs

Paul Cunningham
Ages: 29
Company: Azuro

Funding: $13.3 million from Benchmark Capital, Miramar Venture Partners, TTP Ventures, and angel investors In their quest for growth, makers of cell phones, laptops, and music players need to pack devices with more features and the computing power to run them. But faster chips drain batteries and heat up hardware. Upon earning his doctorate in computer science from the University of Cambridge in Britain, Cunningham founded Azuro in 2002 in hopes of solving that problem.

Azuro's technology helps cut a chip's power output by 15% to 25% without hurting performance. Azuro has lined up customers in Broadcom Corp. and Cambridge Silicon Radio, whose chips help run notebooks, consumer electronics, and medical devices. Lesson learned: “Choose who you take advice from carefully, but once you've chosen them, listen to every word they say,” Cunningham says. “I've set out on a journey, and I have no map and no idea what the landscape is going to be. But there are people around me who have taken similar journeys, over similar landscapes.”