Seven senior executives of Texas Instruments (TI) India, including its former managing director Srini Rajam, on Wednesday announced the launch of their new company, Ittiam Systems Private Limited.

Ittiam’s chairman and CEO, Rajam told reporters here the company would singularly focus on digital signal processor based systems in wireline, wireless, audio-speech and video-imaging markets.

Rajam said Ittiam has raised $5 million in the seed round financing, from Global Technology Ventures (GTV), an investment arm of Sivan Securities, which has Bank of America as equity partners.

Ittiam at present has 40 people, which would quickly go up to 50 and to 200 by next year end. The company would break-even next year, and its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is projected to be 40 per cent in the next five years, according to him.

Six professionals who have left TI India to join the Ittiam management team are: Sattam Dasgupta, Shantanu Jha, Ravishankaran Ganesan, Rohit Bhuva, Vikram Bose and Andrew Bhagyanathan.

Rajam said Ittiam, whose vision statement is to become the world’s best DSP software and systems company, has already floated its US subsidiary and has representative offices in the UK and Japan.

“DSP is one of the fastest growing segments, fuelled by the ever-increasing need for higher bandwidth, mobility and convergence,” says Rajam.

“There is a global market of $9 billion in DSP software and systems, growing at 50 per cent. We will leverage this market potential to its maximum and establish Ittiam as a world class DSP software and systems company from India.” he said.

The end user will be the electronic equipment manufacturers like mobile handsets, audio video players. And, where does the name Ittiam come from? Well, it is the most famous line of great philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) `I think. Therefore I am.’

The revenue forecast for the year 2005 is $40 million, he added.

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