About

I grew up driving tractors on a farm in Norway, but got into Visual Basic and the "C Bible" by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie at an early age, and never looked back. Since then, I have worked on everything from hardware and chip design to cloud services and AI.

I'm an engineer at heart, and often end up in leadership roles. I really enjoy situations where I can combine my technical and leadership skills to build great things.

Journey

This is an overview of my professional journey. A bio can be found at the bottom of the page.

1. 2024 - now

   

   Circuit

   I am the CTO and part of the founding team at Circuit. Several of us previously worked together at Silicon Labs, and we have brought together a group of amazing people to bring AI to manufacturing and service organizations. We are building AI that can understand complex technical content at scale, and agents that use that understanding to tackle complex knowledge work.

2. 2019 - 2024

   

   Sips by

   I was the CTO and co-founder of Sips by, a DTC tea company with a twist. It was a matchmaking service for tea. This is where I had my first dive into AI, building recommendation, e-commerce, and logistics systems to power our fully personalized tea experience. We built something really unique and grew the platform to more than one million members. Sips by reached No. 79 on the 2021 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in the US.

3. 2013 - 2019

   

   Silicon Labs

   I moved to Austin in 2013 to join Silicon Labs as part of the acquisition of Energy Micro. I quickly moved to product marketing, managing Silicon Labs' microcontroller and sensor product lines and later moved into a more strategic role focusing on company-wide software and security efforts. This time was highly impactful for my growth as a leader, and I also learned that my heart was in engineering and engineering leadership. I have 3 US patents from this period.

4. 2008 - 2013

   

   Energy Micro

   I was employee 9 at the semiconductor startup Energy Micro. I started as a Digital Design Engineer, building the UART, I2C, segment LCD controller, top-level interconnect and many other parts of our ultra-low-power EFM32 microcontrollers. After a year, I was promoted to run our digital design team. I still spent a lot of time on implementation, architecture, backend, and design methodology. I later served as design lead and was responsible for the microcontroller families now known as the EFM32 Tiny Gecko and EFM32 Giant Gecko. Energy Micro was acquired by Silicon Labs in 2013 for $170 million.

5. 2008 - 2012

   

   Yast

   Yast was my second startup. Along with a group of friends, I built a time-tracking service, similar to Toggl. We reached 100k paying users, and the service ran until 2019.

6. 2007 - 2008

   

   Maritime Robotics

   While working on my master's thesis on collision avoidance for autonomous surface vehicles, I worked at Maritime Robotics to get their boat and software ready for the live sea trials the thesis required.

7. 2006 - 2007

   C

   Cyberlab.org AS

   I built a simple physics engine and 2D games to teach physics to students.

8. 2004 - 2005

   S

   SmartSMS

   SmartSMS was my first startup. Håvard Halvorsen and I built an opt-in SMS advertising service that shared revenue with its members. We reached 150k users in Scandinavia.

9. 2003 - 2008

   

   Norwegian University of Science and Technology

   I earned a Master of Science in Engineering Cybernetics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). My master's thesis explored Collision Avoidance for Autonomous Surface Vehicles, through both simulations and live sea trials. It has been cited more than 75 times in other research.

Outside work

I live in Austin with my wife of 10 years and our two Australian Shepherds. The picture below is from a hike in Norway about a year after we met. Standing on that boulder is probably the scariest thing I have done in my life.

We have two Australian Shepherds: Bjørn (bear in Norwegian) and Luna (moon).

I have loved tinkering with computers and software since early childhood. Over the years, I have built games, simple physics engines, my own programming language, and more.

And I still tinker today. In 2024, I converted part of our attic into a server room for my rack. I am running two Kubernetes clusters on it, and one of them is hosting this site. You can see some of my current projects on the home page and on GitHub, but most of them remain private.

Since you made it all the way to the end, here are a couple of bonus images from my childhood.

Bio

Øivind Loe is Co-Founder and CTO of Circuit. A full-stack technologist and engineering leader, he has spent his career building systems at the edge of what hardware and software can do, from chip-level digital design and security technology to modern AI-driven software at scale.

Before Circuit, Øivind spent years at Energy Micro and Silicon Labs as a chip designer and engineering team lead, building the ultra-low-power microcontroller and security technology that became foundational to the IoT industry. Moving into product marketing, he took ownership of multiple product lines and spent years working directly with customers and sales teams to drive adoption and growth for technically complex products across global markets.

Øivind also co-founded and served as CTO of Sips by, a DTC business that grew to over one million members. He built and ran the full technical stack, including algorithms and AI for personalization, and led an ERP integration as well as the algorithmic and physical optimization of warehouse operations to deliver a fully customized product that standard pick-and-pack simply couldn't support. He holds three U.S. patents from his embedded systems work and an MSc in Engineering Cybernetics from NTNU in Norway.