High-tech industry veteran Robert LeFort has joined Ember as CEO and a member of its board of directors, the company announced today. LeFort brings more than 20 years of experience growing revenues at global automotive electronics, networking and semiconductor companies to his new role directing Ember’s financial growth and product development strategies.
LeFort arrives just as Ember is experiencing significant market expansion. The company already leads the ZigBee™ market with more OEMs and microcontroller companies supporting its ZigBee-compliant embedded network platform than any other vendor. Its technology enables customers to embed wireless mesh networking capabilities into products for applications in industrial controls, home automation, inventory management, automatic meter reading and environmental monitoring.
LeFort takes over as CEO from Ember Chairman Bob Metcalfe, who has served as interim CEO since June 2005. Metcalfe is a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners, a lead investor in Ember. “Ember has powered through its start-up phase in the nascent embedded wireless networking market,” said Metcalfe. “The company has four years of growing revenue from exciting customers, four major new embedded wireless mesh networking semiconductor and software products, a series of powerful partnerships including most recently STMicroelectronics, and is now ready to scale. We are very fortunate to have started looking for a scaling CEO just as Bob LeFort was deciding to graduate from Infineon, head home to Massachusetts, and take the helm of a young technology company.”
LeFort joins Ember from international semiconductor powerhouse Infineon, where he served as president of North American operations. In four years, he grew revenue 100 percent from
$1 billion to $2 billion after restructuring the entire organization to meet changing market conditions while trimming operating costs.
Previously, LeFort secured $300 million in new business from Ford Motor Company when he served as Ford customer team manager for Delphi Automotive Systems. He started at Delphi’s Delco Electronics Systems by growing the DaimlerChrysler account by 15 percent per year as automotive business development manager. LeFort gained firsthand networking and semiconductor industry experience holding a variety of marketing, sales and engineering management positions at such companies as Analog Devices, Cherry Semiconductor Corp., and MicroNetworks, a division of Unitrode (now a Texas Instruments Company). He earned his master’s degree in business administration at Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts.
“This is an opportune time for me to join Ember,” LeFort said. “I see Ember becoming the Cisco of the embedded networking industry. Our mission is to continue pushing standards-based market adoption of embedded networking while further establishing our market leadership.”
ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance is a rapidly growing, non-profit industry consortium of leading semiconductor manufacturers, technology providers, OEMs, and end-users worldwide. Membership is open to all. Additional information can be found at www.zigbee.org.
About Ember Corporation
Ember’s embedded networks enable communication among embedded microcontrollers with standards-based wireless mesh networking semiconductors and software. Ember helps its customers to automate home appliances, lower energy consumption in buildings, keep borders and infrastructure secure, and control industrial processes, just to name four of the many diverse applications being developed by Ember’s more than 100 customers. Spun out of MIT in 2001, Ember is headquartered in Boston and has its radio development center in Cambridge, England, and distributors worldwide. Ember is a lead member of the ZigBee Alliance, and its platform is the National Technical Systems’ (NTS) “Golden Suite” for 802.15.4/ZigBee interoperability testing. For more information, please visit www.ember.com.
