Ambiq Micro shares close up 60% after IPO as chip designer targets smart glasses

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By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Shares of chip designer Ambiq Micro ended their first trading day on the New York Stock Exchange up more than 60% on Wednesday after the firm raised $96 million in an initial public offering.

The Austin, Texas-based company, which specializes in small computing chips that consume very little energy, began trading at $24 per share and rose as much as 101.8% before ending the day at $38.53, valuing it at $656.5 million.

Ambiq filed for its initial public offering earlier in July, with BofA Securities and UBS acting as the lead underwriters for the offering. 

The company has focused on wearable devices such as smart watches. Sales to Alphabet’s Google, Garmin and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd made up more than 85% of its revenue in its most recent year.

Ambiq founder and Chief Technology Officer Scott Hanson told Reuters the company’s newest family of chips aims to target devices such as smart glasses, which run speech and image recognition algorithms on devices with very small batteries.

“We spent the last 10-plus years figuring out how to build the lowest power chips, and so we’re in a great position to attack the same problem (on glasses),” Hanson said. “The transistor doesn’t care what problem it’s solving, whether it was some security function we did a couple of years ago or, today, some AI model.”

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Harikrishnan Nair)