Seyed Danesh Co-founder and CEO, Higlo

Our first product, the Hearth, sits above the TV. One in each home, it joins living rooms in different homes into one shared space, on the biggest screen in the house.

It isn't a call you place. It's a space you leave open, for an evening with the grand-parents, every night before bedtime, or the whole day on Sundays.

And once you're together, you do things together: laugh and create new shared memories, cards, music, dressing up, toasting marshmallows over the fire.

You use it with your hands, so a four-year-old and an eighty-year-old both get it straight away. No ads, no feeds, and it's off whenever the cover is closed.

Making it feel that simple takes all the effort: custom hardware, software, signal processing, AI, experience and design. Bringing all of those together is what I've done my whole career.

We're still early, but the signals are incredible. Hundreds of households in the US and the UK use it every day, families tell us they can't live without it, and many more are asking to get one.

I had the incredible opportunity to work at the cutting edge of mobile imaging in its most important years, as phone cameras were taking off, chasing the best possible picture from a tiny sensor.

At STMicroelectronics' Imaging Group I developed new imaging technology, and patents that are still cited today, including in Meta's camera patents.

Then a PhD on better communication, alongside my day job at Gigle: a new kind of converter, built around a ring of resistors that rotates as it runs, taken all the way to working silicon.

One chip that could do the job of three different kinds of converter, published in the field's leading journal.

In 2006 I was the first employee of Gigle Networks, a start-up developing chips and signal processing for networking in the home, with teams in Edinburgh, Barcelona and California. We grew to about seventy people through the journey.

Bandwidth in every room

Homes were filling up with HD video and online games, and the bandwidth had to reach every room. The power wiring already did, so we made it carry a gigabit.

I designed the analog heart of those chips, from the architecture down to the silicon, and then moved more and more to the system.

And it was fun: a small team, a hard problem, everyone in one room.

Where I sat

In 2011 I co-founded Metroic, with one aim: bringing accurate energy measurement and management, everywhere.

Everywhere meant everywhere: in data centres, at every level from the room to the rack to the server, so they could run more efficiently; in every home's meter, accurate for its whole life; on equipment across the grid; and catching tampering as it happens.

We built it into silicon: mSure, a measurement that checks its own accuracy, all the time.

The technology was truly ground-breaking, with uses right across the energy infrastructure. Many of the world's major utilities were keen to build it into their networks and equipment, and bringing it to market needed far greater scale.

Inside Analog Devices the job got bigger. The mission was to help a chip company move up the value stack, from parts to whole systems: silicon, software and cloud together.

We went far beyond the meter: programmable switchgear, material sensing, intelligent buildings, and systems sold to some of the world's biggest utilities.

As R&D Director for the Energy, Industrial and Building Automation division, I helped other teams make the same move. It's where that industry has to go, and it comes down to dependability: systems people can build on for decades.

In 2020 I co-founded Pommelhorse to make communication between people more human. Half of what we say is in how we look at each other, and a video call loses most of it.

We built computer vision that runs in real time, to give back eye contact and the right perspective.

After years of creating richer, better call experiences, we found that connection matters far more to families than it does at work. Helping families be more connected is what drove Higlo, and the creation of the Hearth. This chapter is being written today.

I grew up between academics and artists.

At university I was deep in the music and art scene. I ran the university's main popular music society, helping bands form and succeed, and was behind many of its events and club nights.

When that chapter ended, I started a record label, to keep working with amazing artists.

Along the way, I worked with some incredible musicians, in all kind of different capacities.

And forever I've been making things, with electricity, metal, glass and wood. I think creating things is ultimately a way to express your taste.