New Delhi: As India’s annual chip conference kicks off, Mindgrove Technologies, a homegrown semiconductor design startup incubated at IIT Madras, expects to start generating revenue this fiscal year, backed by “about half a dozen” clients.
In an interview with Mint, Shashwath TR, cofounder and chief executive of Mindgrove, said this will mark the first instance of the five-year-old startup earning revenue from its locally made chips integrated into industrial applications and platforms.
Generating revenue would mark a major milestone for Mindgrove, aligning with India’s broader push to establish indigenous design as a core pillar of its nascent semiconductor ecosystem. On 31 August, S Krishnan, secretary at the ministry of electronics and underlined that “building sovereign chip patents that are owned by India are crucial to the country’s interests, and the government is keen to back the semiconductor industry as required to help realize this”.
To achieve this, Shashwath said the startup is “in active discussions and trials with customers across industries such as biometrics, CCTV surveillance, metering and other applications.” He added, “Around half a dozen prospective customers are at a stage where they could be finalised, although the timelines vary across deployments.”
Founded in February 2021, Mindgrove is building chips for use in security-first products such as connected cameras, and in robotics for artificial intelligence-related use cases.
In February 2023 it raised $2.3 million in from Peak XV Partners (then still Sequoia India) and Speciale Invest, an early-stage deep-tech venture capital fund. It followed this up with an $8-million series A funding round in December 2024, with Silicon Valley’s Rocketship VC joining its list of investors.
The company is developing two chips. The first one, designed for connected appliances such as smart cameras, will be commercially rolled out by late 2026. Shashwath confirmed that this chip “is already in use by a small number of customers, such as AtumX.”
AtumX, a robotics-focused education platform, is using Mindgrove’s initial commercial design to teach robotics to school students. Shashwath noted that Mindgrove’s pilot order with AtumX involves supplying an initial 500 chip-powered computing boards. “The products will be piloted in the northeast and J&K, as well as a few other places including, hopefully, Tamil Nadu. We may get a few thousand orders out of that every month.”
Playing catch-up
Companies such as Mindgrove remain far behind their Silicon Valley counterparts. For context, Nvidia acquired Groq, a Silicon Valley startup developing proprietary chips for AI chatbots, for $20 billion on 24 December 2025. Under the Semicon 2.0 incentive scheme unveiled on 15 July, the Centre has earmarked a significant portion of its ₹1.28-trillion outlay to boost domestic chip design through design-linked cash incentives (DLI) and equity funding.
Shashwath noted that Mindgrove is evaluating these government incentives and may apply. “DLI 2’s portal is not open yet. We’re in discussions with Meity to figure out what we can expect from DLI 2, and how much more we need to raise,” he said.
For now, though, the company is accelerating its push to capture a larger base of paying clients, without differentiating between Indian or global ones. “I am not really differentiating between Indian and international clients at this point. Our target opportunities are all in India, and I expect the first big commercial activity in India, not internationally. That is also a reflection of the kind of chips we are making. But I’m not differentiating based on that,” he said.
Industry stakeholders, for the most part, believe this is the right approach. “For Indian chip design companies, the crux of the opportunity will lie within the ability to serve India’s own sovereign needs. For the most part, India’s chipmakers are some distance away from building products for the world. The first big growth phase will all come from local import substitution cases,” Sriram Viswanathan, founding managing partner of Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Celesta Capital, told Mint on 5 June.