Weili Dai has built a career helping turn tech startup after tech startup into successful ventures. The serial entrepreneur is now poised to pocket a windfall from one of them: $237 million from the pending sale of Alphawave IP Group Plc to Qualcomm Inc.

Dai holds a 96.3 million-share stake in the London-listed semiconductor firm, making her its second-largest shareholder. Qualcomm agreed earlier this month to buy Alphawave for about $2.4 billion in cash, in a deal expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

This latest payday will bring the 63-year-old’s estimated fortune to at least $3.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is valuing her for the first time.

Dai’s late husband, Sehat Sutardja, was appointed to Alphawave’s board in April 2021, the same year the company listed in London following a $1.2 billion IPO. After he died in September, Dai inherited his stake in the company and became an interim executive director. Alphawave focuses on increasing semiconductor power efficiency and speed.

Born in Shanghai and later raised in California, Dai began her entrepreneurial journey in 1995 when she and Sutardja co-founded US chipmaker Marvell Technology Inc. around a kitchen table alongside her brother-in-law. The trio chose the name Marvell because they wanted to create “marvelous” devices, the company’s blog says. Their first product — a breakthrough read channel for hard drives that could be produced completely in silicon — helped turn the company into a global semiconductor powerhouse.

Dai didn’t respond to a request from Bloomberg News for comment.

Leaving Marvell

After leaving Marvell in 2016 following accounting probes and activist pressure, Dai reinvented herself as a serial tech founder.

She is one of the founders of Singapore-based Silicon Box, an advanced semiconductor packaging company valued at $1 billion after a funding round last year. She also helped found chipmaker Danger Devices Inc. and artificial intelligence firm MeetKai Inc., which counts radio host Charlamagne Tha God, among its investors. 

Other startups she helped launch include FLC Technology Group, focused on next-generation computer architecture, and DreamBig Semiconductor Inc., which provides solutions for data centers and storage acceleration, according to her LinkedIn profile. She is also chair of Lark Health, a startup using AI to prevent chronic diseases.  

After moving to California in 1979 with her parents, Dai finished high school in San Francisco and later earned a degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her two older brothers later attended the same university and started their own companies in the US, according to a Chinese media outlet. 

Dai and her brothers were part of “a circle of engineers and geeks,” she said in a 2021 interview. “And then I met another one in college, my husband, a man with a big passion for building things,” she said in the same interview.  

Dai and Sutardja’s two sons, Christopher and Nicholas, both received their Ph.Ds in electrical engineering and computer science, also at Berkeley, according to her LinkedIn.  

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Published on June 19, 2025