Semicon startup Netrasemi raises Rs 10 crore in Pre Series A round from Unicorn India Ventures to build Edge AI

Kerala-based Semiconductor startup Netrasemi has raised Rs 10 crore in a Pre Series A round from Unicorn India Ventures to build Edge AI for IoT products. Funds raised will be used for fabrication of

two ML SoC chips (Netra A2000 and Netra R1000)

Founded in 2020 by Jyothis Indirabhai, Sreejith Varma and Deepa Geetha, Netrasemi is an Indian Edge AI semiconductor technology company building system-on-chips (SOC) to enable the new-age need for optimal computing for smart IoT products. With a strong 61 member team, the company is bringing a family of AI/ML capable SOCs and reference designs for solving 100+ AI/ML use cases making Edge AI product development efficient, simple and economical.  These chips go into motherboards that make these products capable of doing advanced AI-based analytics without the need for sending the data to servers and the cloud hence, making them smart, cheap, responsive and independent.  The company is bringing a family of AI/ML capable SOCs and reference designs for solving 100+ AI/ML use cases making Edge AI product development efficient, simple and economical.

In the last 12 months, the company has been receiving encouraging responses from large OEMS across various countries operating in medical, telecom and industrial segments and has started generating strong revenue growth & profits of ~$0.75 M from chip design and porting service for strategy partners, which will grow further in FY25 to 150% with IP revenue, and will grow exponentially starting FY27 once volume production of chips starts.

Commenting on the investment, Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, says “There are attractive opportunities in the Edge AI software market and there is absolutely no denying that the AI industry has the potential to transform various sectors. The funding accelerates Netrasemi’s mission to deploy the solutions on a better scale. We believe Netrasemi will continue to sustain its momentum with its most powerful AI chip for edge devices and strengthen its position in this space. The company has witnessed remarkable progress in the last 12 months and has designed new solutions. Hence, we believe the market opportunity is huge and the company has built the right momentum to capitalise on this segment.”

Netrasemi has designed 3 SoC (System on Chip) family- Netra-R1000, Netra-A2000 and Netra-A4000. All three chips are high-performance ML-capable chips built on an efficient Netrasemi DSA (Domain Specific Architecture) and feature companies' patented graph-stream hardware acceleration architecture. The chips are designed based on various end-customer application requirements and are very power-efficient as well as optimally priced, to be useful for the edge market. Netrasemi chips can enable solution players to develop advanced ML and vision application use cases faster and with ease.

Jyothis Indirabhai, Co-founder Netrasemi, says, “Netrasemi family of chips will be the first AI/ML SoCs from India for intelligent edge devices, with a full array of digital IPs inhouse developed. We not only own the chip but also own what goes inside. We are excited to be backed by Unicorn India Ventures and believe this funding will play a crucial step for us to fuel our continued expansion and success.”

The key target segments of Netra SOCs are surveillance, smart sensors, smart infrastructure, machine vision & industry 4.0, robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles. As the demand for security cameras are surging due to privacy concerns and smart city initiatives, Netrasemi aims to target the market that includes different types of video surveillance among end-user verticals such as government, industrial, BFSI, transportation, and others