2022 ECE Day Seminar by Piyush Desai: From Studying at Illinois Tech to Co-founding a Silicon Valley Start-Up

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering invites you to the annual ECE Day. This year we are honored to have Piyush Desai (M.S. EE '04/Ph.D. '09), Vice President (Motor Design) and Cofounder at Turntide Technologies, to present the talk, “From Studying at Illinois Tech to Co-founding a Silicon Valley Start-Up.”

Biography: Piyush Desai is a hands-on technology leader with three success stories in starting, scaling, and commercializing new technology businesses. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Illinois Institute of Technology, where he also served as an adjunct faculty for teaching motors and drives classes. Desai is passionate about solving meaningful problems by combining innovation with entrepreneurship. Desai worked for multiple companies, founded his own consulting business, and is now at Turntide Technologies Inc (Turntide). Desai co-founded Turntide in 2014 to commercialize his patented High Rotor pole Switched Reluctance Motor (HR-SRM) technology he developed at Illinois Tech during his Ph.D. The company has received investments of over $400M from a Global Coalition of investors, including Amazon Climate Pledge, BMW iVentures, Bill Gate’s Breakthrough Energy Venture, and JLL Spark to invent and scale breakthrough technologies and optimize energy usage. With thousands of successful installations in multiple HVAC applications across the US today, Turntide is a world leader in the production of SRM motor technology.