Hello Honza, great to see you, and thank you for your time!
Honza: Hello, likewise, and thanks for having me!
Tell us in one sentence what TropicSquare does.
H: Tropic Square builds secure chips that protect sensitive data and operations in electronic devices – our chip is like a fortress with a secured perimeter where sensitive data is protected while in use or at rest.
Nice, who are your Team members, and how did you come up with this idea?
Years ago, while our sister company Trezor was prototyping with a so-called secure chip, their developers uncovered a critical vulnerability that made the chip unusable. To even evaluate that chip, they had to sign strict NDAs. Those NDAs not only prevented them from warning customers but also from informing other vendors, despite the vulnerability already being known to the chip manufacturer. That was completely at odds with how things work in the open-source software world, where transparency and responsible disclosure are the norm. In hardware, however, security was and to a large extent still is – closed, opaque, and years behind. That moment made it painfully clear how broken the world of closed, black-box secure chips really was.
So we decided to build something fundamentally different: a chip that anyone can audit, attack, and verify. The goal is simple but ambitious: to make electronics genuinely safer. And this matters more than ever. As connected devices, IoT, and now AI-powered machines increasingly surround us, the attack surface is exploding. Security can’t be an afterthought anymore; it has to be designed in from the silicon all the way up to the application.
Today, we’re still primarily a team of engineers, complemented by business development, and we continue to grow as the product and company evolve. But that original vision – the need for transparent, trustworthy, secure silicon – was the founding moment of Tropic Square, and it still drives everything we do.
What stage are you currently in?
The first generation of our chip TROPIC01, has already entered full production and is available globally. Last year, we successfully implemented the chip into the new Trezor Safe 7, a flagship product of Trezor, the inventor of hardware wallets, and our pilot customer.
What are the biggest obstacles that you are dealing with?
Our goal is maximum transparency without compromising protection. The challenge is finding the right balance – exposing enough detail for researchers to meaningfully test, audit, and improve the chip, while not weakening the security or overwhelming end users with unnecessary complexity.
We operate in an industry where obscurity is deeply embedded in its DNA, and openness and auditability are still relatively new concepts. While these qualities clearly add value for end users, they can be uncomfortable, even disruptive, for traditional industry players.
Our approach is to design with usability in mind from the very beginning: clear documentation, developer kits, and public specifications. That way, transparency doesn’t translate into ‘hard to use,’ but into security people can actually trust and adopt.
What are the industry specifics you need to adapt to?
We have to operate within the established ecosystem, on one hand, behaving like a large, credible industry player and following existing standards. At the same time, we don’t have the resources of incumbents, so we have to be creative, focused, and sometimes deliberately aggressive in how we execute.
The fabless semiconductor model is ultimately a volume game: the more chips you ship, the more relevant and valuable you become to suppliers across the value chain. Building that position from scratch is a long-term effort, and we’re very deliberate about how we invest and scale toward it.
And who are your biggest competitors, and what does your ideal customer look like?
We work best with customers who see security as a long-term commitment, not a one-time purchase. While there are well-established vendors in the market, it’s large and still expanding, which leaves room for new players with a different approach. Ultimately, our biggest competitor isn’t another company; it’s the tendency to undermine security or treat it as a checkbox rather than a continuous responsibility.
And who have been your biggest supporters so far?
We’re fortunate to have strong support from a community of builders and hackers, as well as companies and individuals who truly value security. They understand the risks of non-auditable, black-box solutions, systems where you’re forced to blindly trust a third party without the ability to verify what’s really happening inside.
Congratulations on your success at Nápad Roku. How important are those startup competitions to you and TropicSquare, considering you are a B2B business?
It was a very positive surprise to see hardware startups gaining real recognition in 2025. Hardware has a fundamentally different risk profile from software or SaaS; it’s far more capital-intensive. You have to invest millions of euros upfront, and then spend the next three to five years executing before you know whether your choices of technology, partners, and team will actually result in a product that works and can be manufactured at scale.
Competitions like Startup Roku were extremely helpful, especially on the business side, clarifying our positioning, sharpening how we present the company, and learning how to communicate beyond a purely technical audience. As founders, you often need to explain complex ideas to decision-makers who aren’t engineers, and you have to sell a coherent story, not just great technology. For deep-tech and engineering-driven startups, that transition is one of the hardest challenges.
How does one reach out to you? How do you onboard new clients?
We are easy to find – website, social media, GitHub, conferences, and meetups.
And then how does your business model work?
Our business model is what’s known as fabless chip design. That means we define the product – the electronic chip – design it in-house, and then outsource manufacturing as a service. We sell the finished chips to device manufacturers and OEMs. In this model, volume is everything. The more chips you ship, the better conditions you gain from suppliers across the manufacturing and packaging ecosystem. It does take time for products built around our chip to reach the market, but once they do, their lifecycles tend to be much longer. That’s why the upfront effort and investment pay off over the long term. It’s the same model used by companies like NVIDIA and AMD, and by most modern chip vendors today.
What do you personally enjoy or find most inspiring about working in this environment?
Our journey is about constant learning and overcoming obstacles. We’re working on an important mission, society is changing incredibly fast, and security in electronics needs to catch up. If we want resilient products and infrastructure – the things we all depend on every day, often without even noticing – security has to be built in deliberately and done right.
Is there any news feature or service you are about to launch?
The chip runs firmware both internally and on the host side, which is currently the most visible part of our development work. This makes the chip a flexible platform that can support a wide range of security applications. We’re continuously improving ease of integration, expanding the set of supported use cases, and actively looking for ‘killer applications’ that can drive meaningful volume adoption.
If I ask this dumb HR question, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years from now?”, what would be your answer personally and for TropicSquare?
In five years, we aim to have a portfolio of multiple products and security solutions designed for the post-quantum era. TROPIC01 will gradually be phased out in new designs and replaced by a quantum-ready successor. TROPIC02 will be shipping in volume, while TROPIC03 and TROPIC04 will be in late design stages. Our broader ambition is that auditable, open, secure design becomes the norm – just as closed black-box solutions are today. Tropic Square will evolve into a comprehensive embedded security provider. Chips will remain a critical foundation, but real differentiation will come from understanding security challenges deeply and translating that understanding into the right combination of hardware and software solutions.
On a personal level, I hope I’ll still enjoy tackling hard problems with great teams, both at work and at home. And who knows, maybe collaborating with AI to write a book about Tropic Square will be a nice project for the next decade.
