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Without knowing it, millions of people around the world use Hossein Yassaie’s technology every day. His name, and that of Imagination Technologies, is never emblazoned on the sides of gadgets or across billboards alongside the likes of Apple or Google. Everyone who uses an iPhone, or any of the smartphones available on the market, owes a significant debt of gratitude to the 55-year-old Iranian.


‘We put the “smart” into a lot of these devices,’ he says. ‘Phones weren’t smart until they started using our technology.’

When he joined Imagination – then called VideoLogic – it was a small company with 40 members of staff that built technology used in Microsoft’s DOS system, the forerunner to Windows. Two decades later he employs more than 1,100 people across 12 countries in a company with a market value of £1.7billion and fingers in every technological pie going.

Equally impressive is the group’s customer list, which doubles as a Who’s Who of the high-tech world. Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Intel, Research in Motion, Sharp, Sony, LG and Fujitsu are just some of those who pay to use the firm’s intelligence.

Raised in Iran, his first brush with technology was at the age of four.

He said: ‘I remember I got electrocuted when I was four years old after sticking my hands into a huge radio with valves in it and trying to work out what was going on.

‘So I ended up permanently interested in computers and computer science’.

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