A little-known semiconductor company just won an entrepreneur award previously given to Jensen Huang and Michael Dell

In today’s CEO Daily: Astera Labs wins a top entrepreneur prize.

The big leadership story: Marc Benioff says agents are doing a lot—but not ‘selling and communicating.’

The markets: Mixed with big surges in parts of Asia.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Astera Labs CEO Jitendra Mohan, along with co-founders Sanjay Gajendra and Casey Morrison, won the prestigious EY World Entrepreneur of the Year award in Monaco last night. This tops off a banner year for the Silicon Valley semiconductor company, which creates pioneering connectivity solutions, primarily for AI data centers. As Gajendra put it: “We designed a nervous system for the brain, purpose-built for a world where you have so many computing devices that need to be connected at extreme speed.”

Despite rapidly growing to $1 billion in revenue and a $60 billion market cap, Astera is not a household name. The same could be said of EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year franchise, an independently judged series of competitions that started in Milwaukee in 1986, yielding U.S. winners like Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, Howard Lutnick, and Howard Schultz long before they were stars. Past winners also include the founders of Infosys, Chobani, Jollibee, Cirque du Soleil, GlobalWafers, Biocon and Yubiko. About 5,000 entrepreneurs now compete in regional competitions that culminate in the annual Monaco gathering that this year brought together 58 winners from 46 countries or regions. 

Mohan didn’t initially know about the competition but was blown........

© Fortune