November - 2005 issue > On The Cover

By Ashwini Kachapeswaran

When A.G. Karunakaran “AGK” took that red eye flight to Boston in November 1996, little did he know what he was in for. It wasn’t long before he was in a room full of lawyers throwing one question after another at him. But AGK being the entrepreneur, engineer, and leader answered one question at a time and he soon prevailed. By sunset, he’d won the deal and boarded his flight back to San Jose with a long-term contract for electronic product development.

What would you do in such a scenario? Be happy and complacent? Or charge forth and quietly build a strong business?
AGK and his core founding team members chose the latter. And, GDA Technologies began to grow.

Based on an idea the founding team hit upon during one of their weekly Saturday brainstorming sessions about GDA, the company name originated from the idea to be Global, Designing electronic products in an Automated way. Today, GDA has grown from four people in one room to 300 employees across Asia and North America. Touting a solid $18 million revenue and a proven business model with six design centers across the U.S. and India, GDA now develops silicon and system solutions for world’s leading semiconductor and system companies.

Simply put, GDA helps enable electronic product development, be it chip design, board design, or the embedded software that goes along with it. Over the past nine years or so, they have focused completely on their core competency and created a segment to reckon with: Electronic Design Services.

Of course, the big boys like Cadence once made an aborted attempt to create the EDS segment through their subsidiary Tality. Yet there are still no publicly traded companies in this space. Allowing GDA room to thrive and grow. But can they take advantage of all this opportunity?

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