From Tehran to Saint-Sulpice: Amin Shokrollahi’s Odyssey

A recent profile in Swiss business magazine Bilan traces the journey of Amin Shokrollahi, founder of Kandou AI, from his childhood in Tehran to a career spanning mathematics, academia and semiconductor innovation.

Raised in a modest family, Amin developed an early passion for mathematics through his uncles. His academic ability earned him scholarships that would become pivotal to his education.

At 16, he left Iran for Germany just hours before the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War, turning what was meant to be a short stay into several years away from his family.

He later earned a doctorate in mathematics and computer science in Bonn before moving to the United States for postdoctoral research. There, he founded his first technology start-up, focused on improving network data transmission, whose technology was later acquired by Qualcomm.

In 2003, Amin joined EPFL as a professor, and in 2011 co-founded Kandou Bus, now Kandou AI. At the heart of his work is a fundamental question: how can information be encoded and transmitted more efficiently?

Drawing on principles from information theory, Kandou developed new approaches to communication between electronic components, enabling faster and more energy-efficient data transfer.

These technologies have since been used in systems associated with companies including Lenovo, HP and Dell, as well as platforms based on AMD processors.

Today, that challenge is becoming increasingly important for artificial intelligence. As AI systems grow in scale, performance depends not only on computing power but also on the ability to move enormous quantities of data between processors, GPUs and memory.

Kandou AI is evolving its technology toward AI interconnect architectures, addressing data movement, memory and inference bottlenecks that are becoming central challenges for the industry. The company recently raised $225 million to support its next phase of growth.

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The Bilan profile also reveals the human side of Amin’s story: years of intense commitment to the company, a transition away from executive responsibilities to focus more deeply on technology, and a curiosity that continues to shape his work.

Looking at the rapid rise of AI, he compares the transformation to the arrival of the steam engine — a major technological shift followed by a period of social and economic adaptation.

For Amin, change is inevitable.

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Read the full profile in the September 2026 edition of Bilan.