Founded in 1990 with less than two million pounds of venture capital, ARM looked destined for a rocky ride. Founding CEO Sir Robin Saxby remembers a grim race against time to establish the company before the money ran out.
"It was drama all the way", recalls Saxby, "we were not at all sure it was going to work. It was not at all certain we could get anything right, and it was not until 1993 that there was some real hope".
The previous year, ARM had narrowly escaped running out of money when it sold a license to Plessey Semiconductors (whose managing director was Doug Dunn, currently ARM's Chairman) which had been taken over by GEC (later Marconi).
"We concluded the deal in July then it took until January for GEC head office to approve it", remembers Saxby, "it could have happened so late that we'd have run out of money".
As a back-up strategy, in case the Plessey deal fell through, Saxby had a new investor lined up - Nippon Investments - gained after almost constant journeying to Japan.
"I was going to Japan every month. It was during those lonely hours that life seemed pretty tough".
Then Sharp of Japan took a license. "On my tenth trip to Japan, Mike Muller came with me and we went to Nara (where Sharp has its HQ) and we saw a Sharp sign and I got Mike to take a picture of me standing under it - for luck".
It worked. Then what really put ARM on the map, was Texas Instruments taking a license. Having TI as a licensee was a powerful endorsement of ARM's technology and business model.
Around that time, another early licensee, Cirrus Logic, signed up. Suddenly, things started to come together. For the first time, significant revenues were beginning to come in.
The mobile phone industry embraced the low-power ARM chip as its microprocessor of choice and, In its tenth year of operation, ARM became the 33rd most valuable company in the FTSE100, with a market worth of over nine billion pounds.
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