As the newly-minted CFO of Silvaco, Chris Zegarelli is prioritizing transparent communication with the company’s investors, “making sure we message and set proper expectations, and then the business starts to deliver” on what it has committed to delivering, he said.
Prior to to Zegarelli’s arrival at the the semiconductor design provider last month, the company missed analyst expectations for several quarters. Now the new finance chief, a Broadcom alum, is looking to shore up trust and regain lost ground. “Improving sentiment, making the business more predictable and understandable is a key focus for me,” Zegarelli told CFO Dive in an interview.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has faced significant financial headwinds this year. It reported a revenue drop for its second consecutive quarter in Q2; with revenue declining 19% year-over-year to $12 million, according to its Aug. 6 earnings report. However, the company also narrowed its GAAP net loss to $9.4 million for the quarter, compared to a net loss of $38.4 million in the prior year period.
Showing tangible progress
In his new role, one of Zegarelli’s main areas of focus is in building trust, both when it comes to investors as well as the company’s board and other leaders, he said. While the business has seen some disappointing results in recent quarters, “there's an opportunity to turn that around,” he said.
That will take time, he acknowledged, noting changes partly will include reaching out to more analysts, “being transparent, responding to questions, and then meeting more and more investors and telling the story and getting more awareness of what we're trying to do here,” he said. “Frankly, the most important thing you can do is show tangible progress in executing a plan. There's only so much words can do, so you have to deliver it and show it.”
Zegarelli is the latest executive leadership change made by the company in recent months. In August Silvaco announced that board member Walden Rhines would take its CEO chair, replacing the departing Babak Taheri in the role, according to a press release at the time. The company also appointed three new vice presidents in August, it announced in August along with the earnings.
Zegarelli, who joined Silvaco Group from Infineon Technologies where he served as its senior vice president of finance for two years, brings a deep background in the semiconductor sector with him to Silvaco’s CFO chair. His experience includes working as a senior financial analyst at Intel Corporation, as a manager for Qualcomm and in a number of financial positions during a nine-year tenure at Broadcom, including as its senior director, FP&A, according to his LinkedIn profile.
As a CFO, “I like rolling up my sleeves and helping make things run better, and so I kind of think of myself more in that operational, strategic side of a CFO role,” Zegarelli said of his approach. He credited several of his past experiences with building up that approach and skill set; Broadcom, for example, runs “their business very flat, so as a finance person, you really own top to bottom the P&L” and can get involved in pricing, customer strategy and forecasting, he said.
“I liked having that broader exposure to the business and really being a business partner to the leads of the business I supported,” Zegarelli said.
As CFO of Silvaco, Zegarelli is set to receive an annual base salary of $450,000, and is also eligible for a sign-on bonus of $400,000, to be paid in two installments, according to a securities filing announcing his appointment. The first $200,000 installment will be paid within 30 days of his taking the CFO seat, while the second installment will be paid “upon achievement of the Company’s fiscal 2026 annual operating plan revenue and profit targets at or above 100% of plan, subject to his continued service in good standing through December 31, 2026,” according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Clearing operational hurdles
In looking to make the business more predictable, Zegarelli is also considering how to build out the finance function to better support Silvaco’s needs. While the accounting side is well-represented, the finance side is “a little light,” he said.
One of his plans moving forward is to bolster the finance side “to make sure we can partner well with the business, provide better forecasting tools, ROI tools…really have that seat at the table to help ensure we're guiding investments in the right way,” he said.
He is also looking to ensure things run smoothly on the operational side of the business, Zegarelli said.
“The company's done a lot of acquisitions in the last year, year and a half, and just making sure they're integrated well, that the new teams are structured well, that we're really getting the value out of these deals is an important focus of mine,” he said. “Because we do really need to drive top line growth in the business, and making sure we're positioned to do that is important.”
In August, the company closed its acquisition of Mixel Group Inc., a provider of semiconductor internet protocol solutions, which was “quite big from a people perspective,” Zegarelli said.
As such, he is working with key company leaders to “put the right metrics in place,” he said. That includes hitting the “right balance” of revenue, looking at the size of different teams, and ensuring they have “critical mass on the devleopment side,” he said.