Astera Labs founders win the prestigious 2026 EY World Entrepreneur of the Year

Good morning. Astera Labs CEO Jitendra Mohan, along with co-founders Sanjay Gajendra and Casey Morrison, won the prestigious EY World Entrepreneur of the Year award in Monaco last night. This tops off a banner year for the Silicon Valley semiconductor company, which creates pioneering connectivity solutions, primarily for AI data centers. As Gajendra put it: “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.”

Despite rapidly growing to $1 billion in revenue and a $60 billion market cap, Astera is not a household name. The same could be said of EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year franchise, an independently judged series of competitions that started in Milwaukee in 1986, yielding U.S. winners like Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, Howard Lutnick, and Howard Schultz long before they were stars. Past winners also include the founders of Infosys, Chobani, Jollibee, Cirque du Soleil, GlobalWafers, Biocon and Yubiko. About 5,000 entrepreneurs now compete in regional competitions that culminate in the annual Monaco gathering that this year brought together 58 winners from 46 countries or regions.

Mohan didn’t initially know about the competition but was blown away by the depth and diversity of the network. “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.”

For EY, which now boasts one of the largest global networks of entrepreneurs, the competition clearly brings benefits to the brand, relationship building, business development, and client engagement. For country managers, it’s an opportunity to get face time with EY Global Chair and CEO Janet Truncale, who’s now nearly two years into running a professional services firm of 400,000 people. Like her peers, she faces the challenge of reimagining a business model that must adapt to the agentic age. “You have to allow an environment where you will take risks and fail, and then you learn from failure,” she said, adding that being around entrepreneurs “who are nimble and willing to make decisions without all the answers” reinforces that message.

That doesn’t mean embracing everything they say. With 1,500 employees, Gajendra, for one, doesn’t aspire for Astera Labs to one day have as many people as EY. “Being a big company is a liability given how fast AI is moving. Being small and nimble…is the key.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]

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S&P 500 futures are up 0.09% this morning. The last session closed up 0.58%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.60% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.15% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 2.53%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 3.55%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.45%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.70%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 1.50%. Bitcoin was down at $74K.

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CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.

CEO INITIATIVE INSIGHTS

“My whole life has been behind the scenes, building technology to strip out friction. About 41 million people now use Apex to invest in markets through our partners. AI doesn’t change the need for good plumbing.” – Bill Capuzzi, Apex Fintech Solutions.

In addiction to Capuzzi, this month we also welcome new CEO Initiative members: Heritage Group’s Nicholas Schorsch, Upstart’s Paul Gu, Ascendiun’s Paul Markovich, Edelman CEO Richard Edelman, and Henry Schein CEO Frederick M. Lowery.