Mythic named veteran semiconductor executive Dr. Taner Ozcelik as its new CEO

Mythic named veteran semiconductor executive Dr. Taner Ozcelik, the founder and former VP & GM of NVIDIA’s automotive division, as its new CEO.

Ozcelik is a pioneer in the commercialization of autonomous technologies, having spent 10 years with NVIDIA, where he founded and built the company’s automotive chip division into several hundred million dollars in revenues and accumulated billions of dollars of business.

Dr. Ozcelik developed the first NVIDIA-based systems in autonomous driving and built the world’s first Jetson systems, which later became the foundation of DrivePX and DriveCX systems as well as many robotics systems that are used by customers worldwide.

Following NVIDIA, Dr. Ozcelik was the SVP & GM of the Intelligent Sensing Group at ON Semiconductor for 7 years, where he built a series of divisions spanning numerous edge industries with approximately $1 billion in group revenues, and achieved global leadership positions in robotics, machine vision, advanced driver systems, and automotive cameras.

Most recently, Ozcelik served as EVP & GM for Luminar Technologies, where he led semiconductor companies and R&D, developing a next-generation product with 50x better performance, cost, size and power, and winning new business from major OEMs for several billion dollars.

“I have followed Mythic’s progress for years, and I’m joining now because the technology has reached a pivotal point. Mythic is poised to transform the industry, particularly with their next-generation product,” said Ozcelik. “Energy consumption and cost are the biggest problems facing AI as its rapid expansion fuels a dramatic surge in the demand for memory and power. Analog computing is the only way to bring affordable and orders-of-magnitude more energy-efficient inference AI to every level of the economy, and Mythic is uniquely positioned to lead the charge with their brand new analog computing platform.”

Mythic co-founder and current CEO Dave Fick will move to CTO. “Taner is one of the most respected operators in semiconductors,” said Fick. “I’ve admired his leadership for years, and I’m thrilled to work together to satisfy the AI revolution’s voracious appetite for memory and performance.”

“The industry has spent the last decade developing powerful AI models that we can’t even run at a profit with today’s digital computing technology,” said Matt Ocko, Mythic board member and co-founder and Managing Partner of DCVC, a Palo Alto–based deep tech venture capital firm that has backed Mythic since 2016. “The next decade will be focused on new AI inference markets – actually implementing these models in everyday life and business. Taner is the ideal leader to bring this transformative level of speed and performance to a huge range of new edge devices at dramatically lower price points and power levels.”

Dr. Ozcelik holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.