Born in a sleepy hamlet of Amirpur in Uttar Pradesh, Prakash Agarwal co-found NeoMagic, one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in the world. Under his leadership as president and CEO, NeoMagic went public in March 1997, became one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies, and led the industry in providing multimedia accelerators to notebook PC makers with over 60 percent market share.

An expert in mobile computing, Agarwal is currently ‘restructuring’ and repositioning the company in a bid to exploit new opportunities in digital video disks, video cameras and other devices. In 1998, Agarwal was awarded the 1998 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for excellence and extraordinary success in innovation, financial performance, and personal commitment to his business and his community. He is also on the board of directors of Zeevo, also a fabless semiconductor company.

The NeoMagic founder has also helped another start-up Cirrus Logic grow big. He joined Cirrus Logic when it was an eight-person outfit and by the time he left the company employed over 2,000 people. Agarwal was vice-president of the company’s mobile products division when he decided to explore the physical possibilities of a project that had existed on the drawing board for a long period of time: integrating the memory and logic chips and enabling high-quality multimedia on laptop computers. In the mid-1990s, while NeoMagic ventured to exploit opportunities on the Internet, Fortune magazine counted it among the hottest new companies out there. n