Two Hundred Million by 2030

The offer letter is dated July 16, 2026, and it carries a number Saurabh Sinha cannot negotiate. To take the chief financial officer's seat at Arteris, Inc., he receives performance stock units with a target grant value of $1 million. They vest on two conditions. The company must report trailing four-quarter revenue of $200,000,000 or greater on or before December 31, 2030. The stock must then close at $65 or better, averaged across fifteen trading days, on or before December 31, 2031.

Arteris booked $70.6 million of revenue in 2025.

Nearly triple the company inside four years, or the award pays nothing. The board approved the terms on August 3 and filed them with the Securities and Exchange Commission three days later. Sinha starts September 8.

The Layer Beneath The Brand

Sinha has spent more than two decades in finance seats at companies whose product finishes inside someone else's. Timing systems at Symmetricom. Business phones at ShoreTel. Motion sensors at InvenSense, from March 2014 to June 2018. Then chief accounting officer of JUUL Labs from July 2018 to August 2020, carrying the interim chief financial officer title from January to May 2020.

In September 2020 he took the finance seat at Aeva Technologies, a lidar company. Six weeks later he was on a conference call selling it to the public markets.

The Numbers He Promised

On November 2, 2020, InterPrivate Acquisition Corp. filed the script of that call with the SEC as a Form 425. Aeva's chief financial officer spoke third, after the two co-founders, and he came with dates attached.

Sinha told investors: "We expect to go to production in 2024 with automotive in all three sub-verticals: passenger cars, trucking and mobility." He gave them a concentration figure in the same breath: "Our top seven customers account for 80 percent of 2025 automotive revenue." He put margins on the record: "We expect gross margins to be in the mid-60s." And then the sentence that mattered most to anyone underwriting a company with almost no revenue: "From an overall profitability standpoint, we expect to break even and go positive in 2024 both on EBITDA and free cash flow basis."

Every word was a forward-looking statement, filed under the safe-harbour language that accompanies them. A forward-looking statement is also a date on which the money is supposed to stop going out.

What The Filings Recorded Instead

2024 arrived. Aeva reported revenue of $9.1 million for the year, a net loss of $152.3 million, and $106.9 million of cash consumed by operating activities. In 2025 revenue roughly doubled, to $18.1 million. The loss barely moved, to $145.4 million, and the operating cash outflow widened to $115.1 million.

Break-even was not near. It was not the same order of magnitude.

The engineering did not stall - the commercial clock did. Aeva's own annual report for 2025 lists among its strategic initiatives its selection by a top European passenger original equipment manufacturer and a collaboration with LG Innotek, and the same filing warns shareholders about the lengthy period of time from a design win to implementation. That gap is the whole business. A lidar company wins a programme years before it ships a unit, and every one of those years has to be paid for by someone.

Sinha stayed for all of it. Whatever else the finance chief of a company burning more than $100 million a year does, the job is arithmetic against a clock: Aeva was still filing, still reporting and still spending when he left it in 2026.

The Seat He Takes Now

Arteris sells network-on-chip interconnect intellectual property, the plumbing that moves data around a chip, to the companies designing AI silicon. Its public record is growth without profit. Revenue: $37.9 million in 2021, $50.4 million in 2022, $53.7 million in 2023, $57.7 million in 2024, $70.6 million in 2025. Net loss over the same span: $23.4 million, widening to $34.7 million.

That is the shape of company Sinha has spent six years financing. The difference is that this one has customers who ship in volume, and a predecessor who got it listed.

He succeeds Nick Hawkins, who is retiring after seven years, and who led Arteris through its IPO. Hawkins does not leave the building: he stays on as an executive advisor through February 2027.

The chief executive who hired him, K. Charles Janac, put the brief plainly in the announcement: "Saurabh is a seasoned public company CFO with a track record of helping technology companies scale." Sinha, for his part, went to the customer list: "Arteris has built an exceptional reputation as the trusted system IP partner for many of the world's leading semiconductor innovators."

The Rest Of The Package

Base salary of $440,000. Target bonus of 60 percent. Restricted stock units with a target grant value of $3.7 million, vesting over four years. A second performance award worth $1 million, tied to metrics that do not exist yet - the 2027 long-term incentive programme has not been written.

And underneath all of it, the 2026 award and its two gates: $200 million of trailing revenue by the end of 2030, $65 a share by the end of 2031. Arteris would have to add roughly $130 million of annual revenue in four years. It added $32.7 million in the four years from 2021 to 2025.

The last time Sinha put a number and a date in front of public investors, the date passed and the number did not arrive. This one is written into his own employment agreement.

His first quarter closes three weeks after he sits down.