Monty Cleeves
Founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer
Pinnacle Engines
Monty has a thirty-year career in the semiconductor industry, but his passion has always been engines and engine efficiency. His career spanned engineering and management at Fairchild/National Semiconductor, Cypress Semiconductor, Candescent, and Matrix—ultimately becoming CEO of Kovio. Over the course of his career, he has been granted more than eighty-five patents and currently has more than eighty applications pending. In August of 2007, he refocused his career when he founded Pinnacle Engines to commercialize his ideas for bringing significant efficiency improvements in internal combustion engines to consumers. Monty earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Santa Clara in 1973.