Fathers of Invention
June 23, 2017
By Will Lindner
(Business People-Vermont, 1/2017)
In 2006, Denis Place (left) and Mostafa Daoudi (right) left SUSS MicroTec to found SemiProbe, a supplier of test and inspection equipment for the semiconductor industry. Last year, they brought on Doug Merrill as CEO to take their Winooski company forward.
In 2006 there was an exodus, of sorts, from SUSS MicroTec in Waterbury Center. Three of the leading lights in its probing systems division — general manager Denis Place, applications manager Mostafa Daoudi, and sales and marketing manager Don Feuerstein — left for a new venture.
Next time they were seen, it was as tenants at the UVM Farrell Hall campus of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET), an incubator for promising technological startups in Vermont. With VCET’s assistance they were nursing their enterprise, called SemiProbe, through the early, exciting, but predictably traumatic stages of growth…..