Five years ago, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras told two graduate students to stop pontificating about semiconductors and actually build one. This week, the company those students founded said it expects to book its first revenue.
Mindgrove Technologies, the Chennai-based chip startup incubated at IIT Madras, announced Tuesday it will begin generating sales this fiscal year after half a decade of development work. The company has approximately half a dozen clients approaching final agreements across biometrics, CCTV surveillance, and industrial metering applications, CEO T.R. Shashwath told Mint in a September 2026 interview. An early pilot delivered 500 chip-powered developer boards to AtumX, an education partner that distributed the hardware into Chennai government schools in July. For a startup betting India can design commercially viable semiconductors rather than research curiosities, it's the first real taste of market traction.
Lab work goes commercial
The company's flagship product, the Secure IoT microcontroller, launched in May 2024 following a three-year sprint from incorporation to tape-out. The chip runs a 64-bit RISC-V core clocked up to 700 MHz, manufactured at TSMC's 28-nanometer node. CTO Sharan Srinivas J called it "the Goldilocks node" in a February 2024 conversation with Electronics For You—mature enough for stable manufacturing yields, cheap enough to compete on price with established alternatives.
The underlying architecture traces back to IIT Madras's Shakti C-Class RISC-V design, the open instruction-set alternative to Arm that India's chip mission has embraced as a route toward technological self-reliance. Mindgrove layered on hardware-level security features: AES encryption in 128-, 192-, and 256-bit variants, RSA-2048, SHA-256, a true random number generator, and FIPS-140-2 certified one-time programmable memory baked directly into silicon, according to the company's specifications. Peak power consumption stays below 200 milliwatts. The chip ships in WBGA-144, QFN-64, and QFN-48 packages, with evaluation boards and system-on-module configurations available.
"We are right on the cusp of actually having it commercially available for everybody to buy," Shashwath said in May, as Mindgrove prepared production runs. By August, he told Mint the chip was "out of the lab... coming out of the lab and into the industry."
The founders
Shashwath spent 14 years as a software and electronics engineer at Lucid Software Limited in Chennai, working across nuclear, oil and gas, and aerospace devices before launching Mindgrove in 2021, according to a June speaker biography. His co-founder Sharan was pursuing a PhD at IIT Madras from 2019 to 2024, concentrated on RISC-V architectures. The origin story, per a LinkedIn post from Sharan, centers on Professor V. Kamakoti, who apparently grew tired of hearing the pair theorize about chip design and pushed them to build their own system-on-chip.
The company's LinkedIn page shows an 11-50 employee range with 61 employees discoverable. It raised $2.325 million in seed funding in February 2023, led by Sequoia Capital India (since rebranded as Peak XV Partners), with participation from Speciale Invest and Whiteboard Capital. In December 2024, Mindgrove closed an $8 million Series A co-led by Rocketship.vc and Speciale, joined by Mela Ventures, existing backers, and angels Nishchay Goel and Anshul Goel, Business Standard reported. The government approved a Rs 15 crore grant in December 2024 under the Ministry of Electronics and IT's Design-Linked Incentive scheme to fund a second chip, the Vision SoC.
Building customer pipeline
AtumX's AGNI developer board, powered by Mindgrove's Secure IoT chip, reached approximately 1,000 students across five Chennai government schools during the initial rollout in late July, according to ThePrint. The Atal Innovation Mission supported the program. A "Hello Bharat" coding event in New Delhi on August 13 drew more than 1,000 students. The 500-board pilot order from AtumX represents the first commercial design win the startup has publicly disclosed.
Mindgrove signed a two-year partnership with Pinetics as of May 11, 2026, to integrate its chip into biometric access-control systems and smart devices, Moneycontrol reported. In June, the company inked a memorandum of understanding with Prama India, a surveillance OEM, to qualify the Vision SoC for CCTV and video security products. That MoU isn't yet a purchase order; Prama will prototype and test before committing to volume production.
The company claims its Secure IoT chip delivers up to 30 percent device-level cost savings compared to imported alternatives, Shashwath told Moneycontrol in May. Target applications span smart meters, industrial IoT, wearables, and battery-management systems for electric vehicles, alongside the biometric and surveillance segments.
Vision product line
Mindgrove's second product family, the V2600 Vision SoC, targets smart cameras, dashcams, and industrial vision systems. The chip features a single-core RISC-V processor running at 1.2 GHz, hardware-accelerated H.264 and H.265 video encoding, dual MIPI CSI-2 camera interfaces, and Gigabit Ethernet with time-sensitive networking, per the company's specifications. A higher-end variant, the V2601, steps up to a quad-core design above 1 GHz with four MIPI CSI-2 lanes, LPDDR memory, and eMMC storage support. Multiple January reports suggested the V2600 would launch late this year; the company's website currently lists the chip as "Coming Soon."
TSMC manufactures both the Secure IoT and Vision SoC families at 28 nanometers, Mindgrove confirmed to Moneycontrol in September 2025. TechInsights, the independent teardown firm, analyzed the Secure IoT chip in August and identified the process as TSMC 28nm HPC+. For packaging and testing, Mindgrove has discussed partnerships with Indian outsourced assembly and test providers including Kaynes, CG Power, and Tata, the company said previously. It also plans to work with Tata's Dholera fab once that facility becomes operational and holds a co-development agreement with Bosch Global Software Technologies for validation work.
Competing domestically
Mindgrove sits alongside a cohort of Indian fabless startups chasing similar markets. Peers include BigEndian Semiconductors, which is prototyping camera silicon, InCore Semiconductors, which licenses RISC-V intellectual property, and Netrasemi, focused on vision and edge AI applications, Mint reported in August. All operate within the Digital India RISC-V ecosystem, a government-backed effort to aggregate design talent and foundry demand.
Shashwath has been candid about obstacles. "India's biggest challenge isn't talent—it's the service mindset," he told Business Today in June, referring to the shift required from IT services contracting to building physical products. Domestic demand creation remains a work in progress. New CCTV import rules requiring country-of-origin disclosure have opened a narrow window for locally designed chips, but sustained traction depends on price, performance, and reliability proving out in the field.
The company joined Imagination Technologies' Open Access program in June 2023, becoming the first Indian partner with access to GPU and AI accelerator IP. Shashwath said at the time that using silicon-proven IP "reduced time to market significantly." EE Times listed Mindgrove in its 2025 Silicon 100 emerging companies, citing the RISC-V MCU launch and December Series A round.
Crossing into revenue
This week's announcement that Mindgrove expects first revenues in the current fiscal year closes a chapter on proof-of-concept and opens another on commercial survival. The company declined to disclose revenue projections or unit volumes beyond the AtumX pilot, but Shashwath said production could scale to a few thousand boards per month if demand materializes from the half-dozen prospects in late-stage talks.
For India's semiconductor ambitions, one startup crossing into revenue is less a finish line than a stress test. Mindgrove now has to deliver chips on schedule, support customers through integration headaches, and compete on total cost of ownership against entrenched imports. The Secure IoT chip is in customers' hands. The Vision SoC still needs to ship. And the pipeline from trials to repeat orders will determine whether a lab success becomes a sustainable business, or simply another cautionary tale about the distance between designing silicon and selling it at scale.
