Startup Deep Dive : InCore Semiconductors — the Chennai chip-IP startup that waited six years for its first rupee of revenue

InCore Semiconductors, the Chennai company designing India’s RISC-V processor cores, earned ₹1.9 crore ($198,000) in revenue in the year to March 2025 — up 44.9% from the year before, and still barely enough to cover a single month of the ₹30 crore chip-development project the Indian government is now part-funding at the company.

That gap is not a red flag. It is the ordinary arithmetic of a processor-IP startup: the founders had already spent six years designing chips for no paying customer at all, on a bet that a country which imports almost all of its semiconductors could still learn to design them at home. This is the story of how a government-funded university project turned into a commercial chip-design company, what it took to get from open-source research to a licensable product, and why the money is only now starting to show up.

Quick facts

What they do

InCore Semiconductors designs and licenses processor cores built on the open RISC-V instruction set, then sells the design — not a physical chip — to companies that want a custom silicon brain without building a CPU core from scratch. It calls itself a fabless-semiconductor startup offering “turnkey processor IP solutions” aimed at automotive, industrial-automation and general-electronics customers, as InCore described its own business when it announced its seed round. Buyers take that core design, wrap their own logic around it, and send the combined package to a foundry to be fabricated; InCore never touches the manufacturing itself. Its named end-use categories span electricity meters, smart cards, point-of-sale terminals, wearables, networking gear, IP cameras and BLDC motor controllers — unglamorous, high-volume embedded electronics rather than smartphones or PCs.

The origin

InCore’s roots run through an IIT Madras research programme called SHAKTI, launched in 2014 under computer science professor Veezhinathan Kamakoti, and funded in part by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, as ThePrint reported in November 2018. G S Madhusudan served as senior project adviser on SHAKTI, and Neel Gala — who would go on to chair a global RISC-V compliance working group — was an early team member; both were, per InCore’s own account, among the first presenters at the inaugural RISC-V workshop in Monterey in 2013. The academic project reached a milestone in 2017 and 2018: a 180-nanometre chip fabricated entirely in India at ISRO’s Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Chandigarh, described by ThePrint and by Wikipedia’s entry on the SHAKTI microprocessor as the first RISC-V microprocessor completely designed and made in India, alongside a parallel 22-nanometre batch fabricated at Intel’s Oregon facility that booted Linux in July 2018.

Having proven the architecture inside a university lab, Madhusudan, Gala and fellow SHAKTI contributor Arjun Menon concluded that scaling a RISC-V core business needed a commercial vehicle, not another research grant, and incorporated InCore Semiconductors Private Limited in Chennai on 11 May 2018, according to the company’s corporate filings. Gautam Doshi — a former Intel distinguished engineer with an engineering degree from IIT Bombay and a master’s from UC Berkeley — joined later as Chief Architect, according to Peak XV Partners’ own profile of the company, bringing three decades of production-silicon discipline to a team that had, until then, worked mostly inside academia.

The struggle years

InCore ran on founders’ capital for roughly five years before it raised a single rupee of institutional money, a run Inc42 confirmed in its September 2024 profile of the company. The bigger problem was not cash but the underlying model: SHAKTI had been an open-source academic project, and the founders discovered that openness did not translate into a sellable product. “We realised open source, beyond a point, at least in hardware, is not scalable,” Gala told Inc42 — a conclusion that forced InCore to rewrite the large majority of its codebase into proprietary IP, leaving only an estimated 5–10% overlap with the original SHAKTI source, per the same report. That rewrite bought InCore a sellable core, but not a fast one to sell: closing an IP licence with a global chipmaker or product company typically took six to twelve months of technical evaluation, reflecting both the rigour of chip qualification and, InCore’s own account suggests, a trust deficit that Indian silicon-IP vendors face when pitching skeptical overseas buyers. The company stayed pre-revenue through most of this stretch; its first year of disclosed revenue, FY24, closed at just ₹1.3 crore, six years after incorporation, according to corporate-filings aggregator Tofler.

The turning point

The inflection came in September 2024, when InCore completed its first commercial tapeout — the Azurite and Calcite core families going from RTL design to silicon after six years of a company that had, until then, shipped nothing physical at all. The proof point compounded quickly. In October 2024, InCore unveiled a six-core RISC-V test chip at SEMICON India built from its Azurite and Calcite core generators, which the company says achieved the first demonstration of the Zephyr operating system running on a RISC-V chip. Two months later, in December 2024, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology awarded InCore ₹15 crore (about $1.6 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026) under its Design Linked Incentive scheme — covering up to half of a ₹30 crore project to build InCore’s next core family, Dolomite, as Electronics For You reported. Revenue for the fiscal year that followed, FY25, rose 44.9% to ₹1.9 crore, per Tofler’s filings data. None of these numbers is large in absolute terms, but together they mark the moment InCore stopped being a six-year-old company with no shipped silicon and became one with taped-out cores, a government-backed development budget and rising, if still small, revenue.

The money behind it

• Seed round: $3 million, announced 12 May 2023 — InCore’s only institutional equity round to date, as reported by Entrackr and confirmed by Inc42’s company profile.
• Lead investor: Sequoia Capital India, which rebranded as Peak XV Partners later in 2023; the deal was Sequoia’s second semiconductor investment in India after fellow Chennai RISC-V startup Mindgrove Technologies, according to Digitimes’ reporting on the round.
• Co-investors: Speciale Invest, an early-stage fund with a stated deep-tech focus, and Whiteboard Capital, both named as participants by Digitimes.
• Non-dilutive top-up: ₹15 crore awarded in December 2024 under MeitY’s Design Linked Incentive scheme, reimbursing up to 50% of a ₹30 crore project cost tied specifically to the Dolomite core series (Electronics For You, December 2024).
• Ownership today: founders hold 70.32% of the company, Peak XV Partners 14.63%, an ESOP pool 5.00% and other investors 10.05%, as per Tracxn’s cap-table data drawn from regulatory filings.

No valuation for InCore has been publicly disclosed by the company or reported by the outlets covering the round, so none is stated here.

How it makes money

InCore does not manufacture or sell finished chips; it licenses processor designs the way ARM or SiFive do, collecting money at two different points in a customer’s product cycle.

• Upfront licence fee: a negotiated non-recurring engineering (NRE) fee paid when a customer licenses a core, sized to the scope of customisation involved — described by InCore’s own team in an interview with Electronics For U.
• Per-unit royalty: an additional royalty on every chip a customer ships using an InCore core, with the balance between the upfront fee and the royalty rate negotiated against the customer’s promised volumes, per the same interview.
• Core-Hub generator technology: rather than selling a handful of fixed core designs, InCore’s generators produce configurable core variants on demand — the company’s stated point of difference from catalogue-IP rivals such as ARM, SiFive, Andes Technology, Codasip and MIPS, as Inc42’s September 2024 profile and Tracxn’s own competitor comparison both describe.
• Subsidised R&D: government money reduces the cost side of the ledger directly — the DLI scheme’s 50% reimbursement on the Dolomite project lowers how much of that development InCore itself must fund before any royalty exists (Electronics For You, December 2024).
• The part people get wrong: because InCore builds on an open-source instruction set, outsiders sometimes assume its cores are free to copy; in practice, per Gala’s own account, the company found open licensing commercially unscalable and now sells closed, proprietary implementations built on top of the open standard.

The numbers

Tofler’s filings-based summary is the source for both revenue figures and the 44.9% year-on-year growth rate, a number Inc42’s separately compiled company profile corroborates independently. Pre-FY24 revenue, and profit-or-loss line items for any year, sit behind paywalled report tiers on the filings aggregators checked for this piece and are cut here rather than estimated. InCore’s paid-up equity capital was ₹2.81 lakh against an authorised capital of ₹12 lakh as of its most recent filing on record with Tofler and Zauba Corp — a reminder that, as with most venture-backed startups, the company’s cash sits in share premium and reserves rather than in paid-up capital.

Where the money comes from

InCore has described a three-phase roadmap to itself and to the press: embedded applications processors first, then low-to-mid-end PC and mobile processors, and eventually high-performance computing cores. Commercially, it is entirely inside phase one today.

• Phase one, embedded processors: CEO G S Madhusudan told Forbes India in July 2024 that the company was “70 to 80 percent done” with this stage — the only phase currently generating revenue.
• Phases two and three — PC/mobile-class and high-performance cores — remain roadmap items rather than revenue lines, per the same Forbes India report.
• Named end-markets: electricity and smart meters, smart cards, point-of-sale terminals, wearables, networking equipment, IP cameras and BLDC motor controllers, spanning roughly six to seven segments according to Forbes India and Inc42’s September 2024 profile.
• Customer pipeline: InCore was piloting its cores with 10–12 companies in India and abroad as of September 2024, with Bay Area chip and product companies flagged as a priority customer base, per Inc42.
• Design-ecosystem partners: reference-design tie-ups with HCL and Tessolve extend InCore’s reach into Indian contract design and manufacturing without InCore itself building that capability, as reported by Forbes India.

The surprise, given how RISC-V is usually framed in the press as a threat to ARM’s grip on phones and PCs, is that InCore’s actual money today comes from the opposite end of the market: metering, motor control and card-reader silicon — categories nobody writes headlines about, but which is where phase one, and the company’s entire revenue base, currently sits.

The risks

• Trust and qualification risk: global buyers put unproven Indian silicon IP through six-to-twelve-month evaluation cycles before signing, by InCore’s own account to Inc42 — a delay that pushes revenue recognition further out with every new prospective customer, and compounds if a deal falls through after months of technical diligence.
• Revenue-to-commitment gap: InCore’s entire disclosed FY25 revenue of ₹1.9 crore is a small fraction of the ₹30 crore Dolomite development project the government is co-funding, a mismatch visible by comparing Tofler’s revenue data against Electronics For You’s December 2024 grant reporting; until royalties scale with shipping volumes, the company remains dependent on outside capital, whether equity or grant, to fund its roadmap.
• Competitive crowding: InCore is chasing the same embedded RISC-V design wins as established global IP vendors ARM, SiFive, Andes Technology, Codasip and MIPS, and as domestic rival Mindgrove Technologies — another Chennai, IIT Madras-linked, Sequoia-backed chip-IP startup, founded in 2021 and building its own SHAKTI-derived SoCs, per Tracxn’s competitor comparison of the two companies.

The takeaway

Hardware IP runs on a different clock than software. The same people who first presented SHAKTI’s work at a RISC-V workshop in 2013 did not turn that research into a rupee of licensing revenue until more than a decade later, and did not tape out a commercial chip until six years after incorporating InCore itself. Getting from an open academic prototype to a sellable, proprietary product meant admitting the original approach did not scale, rewriting nearly all of the code, and accepting years of qualification cycles with buyers who had no reason yet to trust an Indian core. None of that shows up in a pitch deck as cleanly as a funding headline does. The transferable lesson for any founder building on top of a research project is blunter than “move fast”: budget for the commercialisation to cost more, and take longer, than the invention did — and expect the first real customer revenue to arrive years after the technology first worked in a lab.

Frequently asked questions

What does InCore Semiconductors actually sell?

It licenses processor core designs built on the open RISC-V instruction set to companies building their own chips, charging an upfront non-recurring engineering fee plus a per-unit royalty; it does not manufacture or sell physical chips itself, as InCore’s own team described to Electronics For U.

Who founded InCore Semiconductors, and when?

G S Madhusudan, Neel Gala and Arjun Menon — all veterans of IIT Madras’s SHAKTI processor programme — incorporated InCore Semiconductors Private Limited in Chennai on 11 May 2018, with former Intel distinguished engineer Gautam Doshi joining later as Chief Architect, per corporate filings and Peak XV Partners’ profile of the company.

How much funding has InCore Semiconductors raised?

InCore raised $3 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) in May 2023, its only disclosed institutional equity round, and separately received a ₹15 crore non-dilutive government grant under the Design Linked Incentive scheme in December 2024, per Entrackr and Electronics For You respectively.

Is InCore Semiconductors profitable?

That is not publicly disclosed. Filings aggregator Tofler shows revenue of ₹1.3 crore in FY24 and ₹1.9 crore in FY25, but profit-or-loss figures were not available in the filings accessed for this piece.

How is InCore Semiconductors different from Mindgrove Technologies?

Both are Chennai-based, IIT Madras-linked, Sequoia/Peak XV-backed RISC-V startups, but InCore focuses on licensing configurable processor core IP to other chipmakers, while Mindgrove designs its own SHAKTI-derived system-on-chip products aimed at secure IoT and edge-compute devices, according to Tracxn’s side-by-side comparison of the two companies.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “InCore Semiconductors raises $3 Mn led by Sequoia,” May 2023
• Digitimes, “India’s RISC-V startup InCore receives funding from Sequoia Capital,” May 2023
• Inc42, “Can InCore Lead India’s Semiconductor Dream With Scalable Processor IPs?,” September 2024
• Inc42, Incore Semiconductors company profile (funding, revenue, employee data), accessed September 2026
• Forbes India, “InCore: Building a semiconductors ecosystem out of India,” July 2024
• Electronics For You Biz, “InCore Semiconductors Secures DLI Scheme Grant For Next-Gen Processor Cores,” December 2024
• InCore Semiconductors, “InCore Unveils Six-Core RISC-V Test Chip To Accelerate Design Adoption,” October 2024
• Electronics For U, “We aspire to be the first choice for companies seeking to transition to RISC-V” (interview), accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Incore Semiconductors Private Limited company financials, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Incore Semiconductors Private Limited legal-entity and shareholding profile, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, InCore vs Mindgrove Technologies competitor comparison, accessed September 2026
• Zauba Corp, Incore Semiconductors Private Limited corporate record, accessed September 2026
• Peak XV Partners, “‘Risc’ V Opportunity: How The Custom Silicon Wave Will Benefit India’s Semiconductor Ambitions,” accessed September 2026
• ThePrint, “Shakti: IIT-Madras develops India’s first indigenous microprocessor,” November 2018
• Wikipedia, “SHAKTI (microprocessor),” accessed September 2026

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.