Startup Deep Dive : Mindgrove Technologies — the Chennai chip startup that raised about $10 million before shipping a commercial chip

By December 2024, Mindgrove Technologies had raised about $10 million across two rounds, hired 40 engineers, taped out a 28nm microcontroller and won a government grant to design a second chip. It had also, on its own account, not yet sold a single commercial chip. That gap between money raised and revenue booked is the whole story of a fabless semiconductor startup, and Mindgrove sits squarely inside it.

The Chennai company, spun out of the RISC-V research culture at IIT Madras, is trying to do something that Indian software startups almost never have to: spend years and crores of rupees before a paying customer exists. Chief executive T.R. Shashwath has said plainly that chip companies “need three to five years for revenue” and require patient capital (Business Today interview, June 2026). This piece traces where that money went, what the company has actually built, and the specific risks that could still sink it.

Quick facts

What Mindgrove does

Mindgrove is a fabless semiconductor company: it designs the chip and outsources the actual fabrication to a foundry. Its products are microcontroller system-on-chips (SoCs), the small brains that sit inside connected devices, built on the open RISC-V instruction set and specifically on the Shakti processor cores developed at IIT Madras. The pitch is a homegrown alternative to imported microcontrollers, sold to Indian electronics manufacturers and to global OEMs building in India.

• Flagship product: Secure IoT (product code S2401), described by the company as India’s first commercial-grade, high-performance microcontroller SoC (company-stated; repeated by Business Standard, YourStory and CircuitDigest, December 2024).
• Process node: 28nm, running at clock speeds up to 700 MHz, built around the Shakti C-class RISC-V core (CircuitDigest S2401 interview, 2026).
• On-chip security block: AES-256, RSA-2048, SHA-256, a true random number generator and one-time-programmable memory (CircuitDigest, 2026).
• Target uses: smart meters, wearables, smart locks and access control, printers, point-of-sale machines and industrial edge devices (Business Standard and AIM, 2024–2026).
• Second chip: Vision SoC (product code V2600) for edge computing and vision workloads such as CCTV, dashcams, ADAS and smart TVs (AIM, June 2026).

The origin

The founding insight was a shortage, not a slogan. Both founders came out of computer-vision and embedded work, and by their own account they kept hitting the same wall: the processors they needed for radar systems, cameras and instruments were either too costly, wrong on specifications, or simply unavailable in India when they wanted them. That recurring frustration, they have said, is what pushed them to design silicon themselves rather than keep sourcing it (founder account, VieStories and Analytics India Magazine).

They did not start from a blank sheet. IIT Madras had spent roughly a decade building Shakti, an indigenous family of processor cores based on the open RISC-V architecture that came out of UC Berkeley, led by Professor V. Kamakoti’s group and backed by the government’s electronics ministry (Forbes India; Analytics India Magazine). Mindgrove licensed and built on those Shakti cores, then added its own chip architecture, security subsystem and integration work, which is the part the company insists is entirely its own (Shashwath, AIM, June 2026). T.R. Shashwath, the CEO, is an electronics engineer with over a decade of industry experience; Sharan Srinivas Jagathrakshakan is a PhD researcher at IIT Madras working on RISC-V-based architectures for edge vision, with a prior software background (Inc42; company profiles). The company was incorporated on 5 February 2021 and incubated through IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation and the IIT Madras Incubation Cell.

The struggle years

The hard part of a chip startup is that the calendar keeps slipping and there is nothing to sell while it does. Mindgrove’s public timeline shows exactly that drift. When it raised seed money in February 2023, the company told Entrackr it was targeting a tape-out, the point where a finished design is sent to the foundry, around November 2023. The formal tape-out of the Secure IoT chip was instead announced in May 2024, roughly half a year later than the earliest public target.

The launch date moved further and repeatedly. In its December 2024 Series A coverage, Mindgrove said the Secure IoT chip would reach the market by mid-2025 (Business Standard; CircuitDigest). By mid-2026, the CEO was guiding to a commercial rollout only by the end of 2026, with the Vision SoC pushed to the end of 2027 (Analytics India Magazine, June 2026). Underneath those headline dates sat a slow, expensive engineering grind: the design went into fabrication in August 2022, the first ten physical chips came back in August 2023, and a wider pilot ran on roughly 70 chips before any volume production (Inc42). And as late as December 2024 the company acknowledged it was still “in talks with potential customers” with no final agreements signed. For two to three years, in other words, Mindgrove was a company with cores, prototypes and a grant, but without a shipping product or a signed buyer.

The turning point

The single event that changed Mindgrove’s standing was the May 2024 tape-out of the Secure IoT SoC. Before it, Mindgrove was a well-regarded design team with borrowed cores and a plan; after it, it had a physical, 28nm, 700 MHz microcontroller it could show to customers and investors as India’s first commercial-grade high-performance microcontroller of its kind (company-stated). The numbers on either side of that milestone tell the story. Before the tape-out, the company had raised $2.35 million in seed capital and employed a small team. In the seven months after it, Mindgrove closed an $8 million Series A in December 2024, roughly 3.4 times its seed round, grew to 40 employees with a stated plan to reach 100 within two years, and won ₹15 crore under the government’s Design Linked Incentive scheme to fund a second chip. The tape-out did not produce revenue, but it converted a research project into a fundable product company.

The money behind it

Mindgrove has raised in two priced rounds plus a government grant, and no valuation has been disclosed for either round.

• Seed, February 2023: about $2.35 million (some outlets report $2.32 million), led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Speciale Invest and Whiteboard Capital, with angels Ashwini Asokan and Nischay Goel (Entrackr, February 2023; YourStory).
• Surge cohort, October 2023: Mindgrove joined Surge 09, Peak XV’s accelerator programme, a 13-startup batch of which seven were Indian (Inc42; Outlook Business).
• Series A, December 2024: $8 million, co-led by Rocketship.vc and Speciale Invest, with participation from Mela Ventures and existing backers Peak XV Partners, Whiteboard Capital and Nischay Goel, plus new investor Anshul Goel (YourStory; Business Standard; CircuitDigest).
• Government grant: ₹15 crore approved under the Design Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme to develop the Vision SoC (CircuitDigest; Series A coverage, December 2024).

That puts equity raised at roughly $10.35 million (about ₹99 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), plus the ₹15 crore DLI grant. Each backer changed something concrete: Peak XV’s seed cheque and Surge seat gave a first-time deep-tech founder credibility and network; Speciale Invest, a deep-tech specialist, co-led both rounds; Rocketship.vc brought the larger Series A cheque aimed at commercial launch and hiring.

How it makes money

Mindgrove’s model is chip sales, not software licences, and that shapes everything about its economics.

• Money in: selling its own-brand microcontroller SoCs to electronics manufacturers and OEMs; revenue arrives only once a chip is qualified, designed into a product and ordered in volume.
• Costs out: heavily front-loaded. Design salaries, EDA tools, IP licences (including Shakti cores and, from June 2023, Imagination Technologies graphics and AI-accelerator IP, per Forbes India), plus the cost of fabrication at an external foundry, since Mindgrove is fabless and owns no fab.
• Where the margin sits: in volume. Chip design has enormous fixed costs and low marginal cost per unit, so profitability depends on shipping large quantities of a proven design, not on any single sale.
• The pricing claim: Mindgrove positions on cost, saying its chips carry roughly a 30% cost advantage versus comparable market parts (Inc42), and the CEO has separately claimed being “50-60% cheaper at the top end of the market” (AIM). Both are company claims, not audited figures.
• What people get wrong: this is not a licensing business like Arm. Mindgrove earns when hardware ships, which is why revenue has stayed small while the design matures. The CEO’s own guide is that chip firms take three to five years to reach revenue and target FY28 for profitability (Business Today and Whalesbook, 2026).

The numbers

Mindgrove is early enough that its financials reflect an R&D-stage company, not a commercial one. The figures below are as read by Tracxn from the company’s Registrar of Companies filings; the company has not published audited statements publicly. Absolute revenue is disclosed only for FY25, with prior years described in growth terms.

The pattern is consistent with the model: small but fast-growing revenue off a near-zero base, funded losses as the team spends ahead of product launch, and a net worth drawn down by burn between funding rounds. No reliable FY23 absolute revenue is on the public record, so it is left out rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

Because Mindgrove is pre-commercial, its “revenue mix” today is less about customer segments and more about which markets it is aiming the two chips at, and where its capital actually comes from.

• Chip line 1, Secure IoT (S2401): smart meters, wearables, smart locks and access control, printers and point-of-sale machines, plus connected automotive sub-assemblies and industrial edge (Business Standard; CircuitDigest).
• Chip line 2, Vision SoC (V2600): vision and edge-AI applications such as CCTV cameras, dashcams, ADAS and smart TVs (AIM, June 2026).
• Geography: Indian electronics manufacturers plus global OEMs that build in India; the company has deliberately excluded smartphones to avoid competing with Apple and Qualcomm (Inc42).
• The surprise: a meaningful slice of Mindgrove’s funding is non-dilutive government money. The ₹15 crore DLI grant sits alongside roughly $10.35 million of equity, so the state is directly co-funding the second chip, in line with India’s ambition to build a domestic semiconductor design base.
• Market backdrop it cites: India’s semiconductor industry projected at about $150 billion by 2030, and a global smart-devices market projection of $116.4 billion over five years (Inc42) — third-party projections, not company revenue.

The risks

The risks here are the classic ones of hardware deep-tech, and they are concrete.

• Commercialisation risk. As of December 2024 Mindgrove had no signed customers, only talks (Inc42), and the launch date has already moved from mid-2025 to end-2026. A product that keeps slipping burns cash without booking revenue; the mechanism is simple, runway is finite and each delay pushes the first real sale further out.
• Capital intensity and gestation. The CEO’s own framing is that chip firms need three to five years and patient capital before revenue, with profitability targeted only around FY28 (Business Today; Whalesbook). If patient capital dries up before the design ships in volume, the company cannot simply cut costs to survive, because the costs are front-loaded design spend already incurred.
• Foundry and supply-chain dependency. Being fabless with no commercial Indian fab at 28nm, Mindgrove depends on external foundries for fabrication and packaging; capacity, pricing and geopolitics of chip manufacturing are outside its control.
• Competition on both flanks. Mindgrove is up against entrenched global microcontroller makers on price and reliability, and against a cluster of domestic RISC-V peers including InCore Semiconductors, Netrasemi, Blueberry Technologies and Sensesemi (Inc42; Entrackr). Winning design-ins against incumbents with decades of tooling and customer trust is the core commercial challenge.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Mindgrove is about the shape of deep-tech capital, not about chips. A software startup can raise, ship and earn in the same year; a semiconductor startup raises years before it earns, and the founder’s main job is to keep enough patient capital and enough credibility alive across a long, silent gap. Mindgrove has done the credibility part well: a real tape-out, brand-name backers, a government grant and a clear product roadmap. What it has not yet done is the part that ultimately matters, which is convert a 28nm chip into signed volume orders and recurring revenue. Judge it, and companies like it, not on how much it has raised but on how close it is to that first commercial shipment. On that test, the honest answer as of 2026 is: close, but not there yet.

Frequently asked questions

What does Mindgrove Technologies make?

It is a fabless semiconductor startup that designs microcontroller system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the open RISC-V architecture and IIT Madras’s Shakti processor cores. Its flagship is the Secure IoT (S2401) chip, a 28nm microcontroller running up to 700 MHz, aimed at smart meters, wearables, access control and industrial edge devices.

How much funding has Mindgrove raised, and from whom?

About $10.35 million in equity: a roughly $2.35 million seed in February 2023 and an $8 million Series A in December 2024. Backers include Peak XV Partners, Speciale Invest, Whiteboard Capital, Rocketship.vc and Mela Ventures. It also won a ₹15 crore government DLI grant for its Vision SoC. No valuation has been disclosed.

Who founded Mindgrove and when?

It was co-founded by T.R. Shashwath (CEO), an electronics engineer, and Sharan Srinivas Jagathrakshakan, a RISC-V researcher at IIT Madras. The company was incorporated on 5 February 2021 and incubated at IIT Madras.

Is Mindgrove profitable?

No. It is a pre-commercial, loss-making company. Tracxn’s reading of its filings shows about ₹3 crore of revenue in FY25 off a very small base, with widening losses. The CEO has said chip companies take three to five years to reach revenue and has pointed to FY28 as a profitability target.

Why is Mindgrove significant for India?

It is one of the first Indian startups to design a commercial-grade microcontroller on home-grown RISC-V cores, part of India’s push to build a domestic chip-design base. Its progress is partly co-funded by the government’s Design Linked Incentive scheme.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr — “Mindgrove raises seed funding led by Sequoia India and others,” February 2023.
• Forbes India — “How one startup is spawning a chip design ecosystem in India,” 2024.
• Inc42 — “How semiconductor startup Mindgrove is powering smart devices with low cost, high-performance chips,” 2024.
• Inc42 / Outlook Business — Peak XV Surge 09 cohort coverage, October 2023.
• Business Standard — “Semiconductor startup Mindgrove Technologies raises $8 mn Series A,” December 2024.
• YourStory — “Mindgrove Technologies raises $8M in Series A co-led by Rocketship.vc and Speciale Invest,” December 2024.
• CircuitDigest — “Mindgrove Technologies raises $8 million,” December 2024, and the S2401 Secure IoT interview, 2026.
• Analytics India Magazine — “Mindgrove Technologies’ Shashwath TR on making India’s most secure chip,” June 2026.
• Business Today — “India’s biggest challenge isn’t talent. It’s the service mindset, says Mindgrove CEO Shashwath TR,” June 2026.
• Whalesbook — “Mindgrove targets IoT chip rollout by 2026, FY28 profitability,” 2026.
• Tracxn — Mindgrove Technologies Private Limited company and legal-entity profiles (financials, CIN, incorporation), accessed September 2026.
• ZaubaCorp / Tofler / TheCompanyCheck — MCA registration data (CIN U29100TN2021PTC141187, incorporated 5 February 2021, ROC Chennai), accessed September 2026.

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