Relatively unknown chipmaker takes top entrepreneur award, following past winners Jensen Huang and Michael Dell

• In today’s CEO Daily: Astera Labs secures a major entrepreneur award.
• The big leadership story: Marc Benioff notes agents are handling many tasks—except ‘selling and communicating.’
• The markets: Mixed performance with significant rallies in parts of Asia.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from .

(SeaPRwire) –   Good morning. Last night in Monaco, Astera Labs CEO Jitendra Mohan and his co-founders, Sanjay Gajendra and Casey Morrison, received the distinguished EY World Entrepreneur of the Year award. This achievement caps a remarkable year for the Silicon Valley semiconductor firm, which specializes in developing cutting-edge connectivity solutions tailored for AI data centers. Gajendra described their work: “We designed a nervous system for the brain, purpose-built for a world where you have so many computing devices that need to be connected at extreme speed.”

Although Astera has quickly scaled to $1 billion in revenue and a $60 billion market capitalization, it remains relatively unknown to the general public. Similarly, EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year program—an independently judged competition series originating in Milwaukee in 1986—has produced U.S. winners such as Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, Howard Lutnick, and Howard Schultz well before they achieved fame. The roster of past winners also features the founders of Infosys, Chobani, Jollibee, Cirque du Soleil, GlobalWafers, Biocon, and Yubiko. Currently, around 5,000 entrepreneurs participate in regional contests leading up to the annual Monaco event, which this year hosted 58 winners representing 46 countries or regions.

Mohan was previously unaware of the competition but was impressed by the network’s depth and diversity. “This is about the entrepreneur journey and hopefully becoming part of a much larger entrepreneurship community where they can help us, and we can help them,” he remarked.

For EY, which now possesses one of the world’s largest entrepreneur networks, the competition offers clear advantages in terms of brand value, relationship cultivation, business growth, and client interaction. For country managers, the event provides a chance to meet with EY Global Chair and CEO Janet Truncale, who is approaching her second year leading a professional services organization of 400,000 employees. Like her counterparts, she is tasked with reinventing a business model to suit the agentic era. “You have to allow an environment where you will take risks and fail, and then you learn from failure,” she stated, noting that interacting with entrepreneurs “who are nimble and willing to make decisions without all the answers” strengthens this perspective.

However, that does not imply adopting every viewpoint they express. With a workforce of 1,500, Gajendra, specifically, does not aim for Astera Labs to eventually match EY’s headcount. “Being a big company is a liability given how fast AI is moving. Being small and nimble…is the key,” he argued.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@.com