Primary Job Title CEO and Founder Primary Organization 
ADI Engineering
Location Charlottesville, Virginia, United States Regions East Coast, Southern US Gender Male
LinkedIn View on LinkedIn
Steve Yates is CEO and Co-Founder of Federant, where he is building open governance infrastructure for autonomous edge AI. A licensed Professional Engineer (Virginia), IEEE Senior Member, and inventor on 20 U.S. patents (issued and pending), he brings over three decades of experience in edge networking, embedded systems, and industrial
hardware/software platforms.
Previously, Yates founded ADI Engineering and bootstrapped it from a design house into a global OEM edge networking supplier with Tier-1 customers including a 15-year sole-source relationship with Intel. He led ADI's acquisition by Silicom Ltd. (NASDAQ: SILC) in 2015 and served as Co-President and CTO post-acquisition.
At Federant, Yates and CTO Tony Masters are building the Federant Edge Platform — combining ruggedized open hardware, an offline-first operating system, and a cloud-based supervisory control plane to keep autonomous AI systems governed and operational in environments where connectivity is intermittent or absent. Federant is a participant in the RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP Cohort XXII, 2026) and a member of the Telecom Infra Project.
Focus areas: Edge AI, embedded systems, multi-radio wireless networking, industrial autonomy, and data sovereignty for remote and harsh-environment operations.
