IIT Madras incubated semiconductor startup Mindgrove technology has bagged $2.35 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital India, Speciale Invest, and Whiteboard Capital. Ashwini Asokan and Nischay Goel also participated.
These fresh funds will be used to make investments in technology and grow the team, Mindgrove stated in a press release.
Vishesh Rajaram, the managing partner (MP) of Speciale Invest, said, “Mindgrove Technologies is leading the charge in cutting-edge chip design, and we are proud to be a part of their vision. Their SoCs are a game-changer in the industry, and the team, supported by the expertise of IIT Madras, makes them a highly attractive investment opportunity. It was a no-brainer for us to be a part of their journey.”
Founded in 2021 by Shashwath T R and Sharan Srinivas J, Mindgrove designs System-on-Chips (SoCS) in India under the brand name Mindgrove Silicon. These SoCs are built to be power-efficient and cost-effective for use in IoT, vision, automobiles, et al. Mindgrove Silicon SoCs aim to deliver best-in-class performance with low power. This is useful in applications where power use is constrained like automotive, consumer electronics, industrial automation, security, and aviation.
Mindgrove’s series of 3 SoCs – System on Chips – are designed specifically for Edge signal processing and vision applications. They are based on the “Shakti” core microprocessor which is an industrial-grade microprocessor. Shakti was developed at the Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering( RISE) Lab at IIT Madras, under the Digital India RISC-V program funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
Chennai-based Mindgrove competes with the likes of Applied Materials, TSMC India, Micron Technology, and Solex Energy among others.