Weili Dai

Meet the only woman to ever co-found a major U.S. semiconductor company.

Weili Dai was born in Shanghai, where she played semi-pro basketball as a child.

When her family moved to San Francisco, she didn’t speak a word of English.

So she carried a pocket dictionary everywhere she went.

Eventually, she earned a degree in computer science from UC Berkeley.

There, she met her future husband and business partner, Sehat Sutardja.

In 1995, they co-founded Marvell Technology: a semiconductor company.

They initially used secondhand computers, fed engineers with homemade stir-fry, and worked nonstop to get their startup off the ground.

A decade later, Marvell had become a global player.

Dai secured deals with giants like Samsung, Western Digital, and Seagate, while positioning Marvell as a reliable supplier at a time when demand for high-performance chips was exploding.

By 2014, the company had more than 7,000 employees and was shipping over a billion chips a year for smartphones, TVs, enterprise systems, and more.

Revenue hit $3.5B.

Dai was named to Forbes’ list of the 100 Most Powerful Women.

Honored by CNN.

And, in 2012, became the first female commencement speaker for UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering.

Unfortunately, in 2008, Marvell and Dai were fined by the SEC for improperly backdating employee stock options.

She stepped down from her executive role and paid a $500,000 penalty.

Then, in 2016, she and her husband were ousted entirely after an internal investigation found Marvell had booked revenues prematurely.

So Dai began investing in promising tech companies like Next Input and Alphawave.

Then she co-founded not one but four new ventures:
- MeetKai: an AI-powered concierge platform with over 75M users worldwide
- DreamBig: a semiconductor startup focused on high-performance SMARTNIC chips for data centers
- Silicon Box: a chiplet packaging company based in Singapore
- FLC Technology Group: a computing architecture company focused on high-efficiency, large-dataset processing

In 2024, her husband passed away.

She inherited his 96.3M shares in Alphawave IP Group, joined its board, and in 2025, helped oversee its sale to Qualcomm for $2.4B.

Her payout from the deal: $237M.

It brought her personal net worth to over $3B.

But Dai isn’t just a billionaire.

She sits on the board of organizations like Give2Asia and Lark Health.

Supports women in STEM.

And helped fund the Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley, which houses the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

Ultimately, her leadership style is rooted in a simple mantra: fair and care.

“Whatever you do, you have to be fair to those around you and genuinely care,” she said. “Think of ways to add value. If your customer or partner is more successful, so are you.”