The beige walls of Suite 450 at 2107 North First Street in San Jose house a team trying to solve one of consumer electronics' most stubborn problems: how to make batteries last longer in devices that keep getting smarter and smaller.
Overlord Labs announced Wednesday it has raised $7.25 million in a seed round, bringing total funding to $10 million when including non-dilutive strategic development capital. Band of Angels led the oversubscribed $4.35 million seed extension, with backing from Foothill Ventures, Unlock Pacific Ventures, NuFund Venture Group, Sand Hill Angels, and Castle Fund.
The fabless semiconductor startup has built what it calls the GENESIS Battery Intelligence IC, a programmable chip designed to manage single-cell batteries in smart glasses, wearables, hearables, and other edge AI devices. At its core are dual RISC-V processors that run physics-based algorithms directly on silicon, executing control loops and custom code for what the company terms "battery intelligence infrastructure."
Breaking the Trifecta
"We started Overlord Labs because battery management architectures were no longer keeping pace with the devices they power," said Richard Nicholson, who co-founded the company as CEO alongside COO Carlos Rodriguez.
Rodriguez framed the challenge in starker terms. Hardware OEMs "have historically faced a rigid trifecta of trade-offs: performance, form factor, and battery life." The promise of Overlord's programmable, algorithm-driven approach is to extend runtime in compute-intensive devices where traditional fixed-function battery controllers struggle.
Meta highlighted the mechanical constraints in a June 2026 engineering blog post on "ultra-narrow" smart-glasses batteries, emphasizing the punishing space limitations and daily runtime expectations that define the category.
The GENESIS chip supports both established and emerging battery chemistries. That includes silicon-anode cells, a newer technology that companies like Enovix have begun shipping commercially for smart eyewear applications. The chip delivers predictive protection, hardware-rooted security, and real-time state-of-charge and state-of-health telemetry.
From Design to Silicon
Overlord taped out the GENESIS design using Weebit Nano's embedded ReRAM technology at DB HiTek foundry, according to an announcement on the Australian Securities Exchange. The company now has working silicon in hand and is preparing customer sampling.
The founding team includes David Maxwell as CTO, Joe Crop as SVP of Digital & Algorithms, and Rafael Medina as SVP of Analog Design. The board recently added David Heacock, former SVP and general manager at Texas Instruments' Silicon Valley Analog division following the National Semiconductor acquisition, and Hon. Robert M. Speer, former Acting Secretary of the U.S. Army.
Nicholson said the company has "working silicon, active customer engagement and an investor syndicate... that understands the scale of the opportunity." Overlord declined to name specific customers.
Competing in an Established Market
The wearables battery management landscape isn't exactly empty. Analog Devices and Texas Instruments already supply battery management ICs, fuel gauges, and power management chips for wearables and hearables. Their product catalogs show years of incremental refinement for these constrained environments.
What Overlord is betting on is that programmability matters more now. "We engineered GENESIS to break those constraints... a software-defined silicon they need to scale all three without compromise," Rodriguez said.
The fresh capital will fund validation and qualification work, support customer sampling and what the company described as Tier-1 OEM engagements, expand firmware and battery-algorithm capabilities, and build production infrastructure. Overlord is targeting volume production in the first half of 2027.
The startup is engaging with wearable, hearable, and edge AI ecosystem OEMs through an Early Technology Access Program. LinkedIn lists the company's headcount at 11–50 employees, a typical range for a seed-stage semiconductor venture with silicon in development.
Whether Overlord's programmable approach can dislodge incumbents or carve out a meaningful foothold remains to be seen. But with working chips and a roster of strategic investors, the company has moved beyond PowerPoint. Now comes the harder part: convincing OEMs to design it in.
