Espressif

Founded in 2008. The ESP8266 (2014) was a breakthrough: a Wi-Fi chip for a few dollars that anyone could solder onto anything. The ESP32 (2016) added Bluetooth, two cores and more memory, and became the default choice for maker projects — often programmed through the Arduino environment. Later variants such as the ESP32-C3 swapped the in-house Xtensa core for RISC-V.

Espressif is fabless and listed in Shanghai. Much of its success came from the low price and from open SDKs and documentation — the barrier to getting started was close to nil.