IIT Madras Incubated Semiconductor Startup Mindgrove Raises $2.32 Mn in Seed Funding

Chennai-based Semiconductor startup MindGrove Technologies has secured $2.325 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital India.

Other investors who participated in the round include Speciale Invest and Whiteboard Capital, as well as Ashwini Asokan, CEO of Mad Street Den, and Nischay Goel, CIO of Duro Capital, who participated in their personal.

Mindgrove designs state-of-the-art, scalable, and reliable System-on-Chips (SOCS) in India. These high-performance chips can be leveraged in power-constrained environments such as industrial automation, automotive, consumer electronics, defense, security, and aviation.

Founded in 2021, by Shashwath T. R. and Sharan Srinivas J., Mindgrove design cost and power-effective microprocessor technology in India, for the world. Mindgrove is backed by IIT Madras Incubation Cell, and IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation, a DST, Govt of India funded section 08 company housing the Technology Innovation Hub on Sensors, Networking, Actuators, and Control Systems (SNACS).

Mindgrove designs state-of-the-art, scalable, and reliable System-on-Chips (SOCs) in India. These high-performance chips can be leveraged in power-constrained environments such as industrial automation, automotive, consumer electronics, defense, 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 amongst India’s first industrial grade microprocessors. 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 (MeitY) .

About the founders of Mindgrove, Shashwath is an electronics engineer by training. A graduate from SRM Engineering college, Shashwath worked at Lucid Software from 2006 to 2021. Lucid provides Non Destructive Testing (NDT) services to various heavy industries.

During his 15 year stint at Lucid, Shashwath developed specialised ultrasound devices, drivers and computer vision algorithms for the nuclear, oil and gas and the aerospace industry. He is an expert in systems engineering, signal processing and machine vision software.

While, Sharan is a computer scientist with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Meenakshi Sundararajan Engineering College, Anna University (2012) and a masters degree in Computational Science from ETH Zurich.

At ETH Zurich, Sharan developed an interest in programming for high performance scientific applications. He worked at Lucid Software from 2016-2021 where he developed CUDA/OpenCL programs running on NVIDIA GPUs. At Lucid, Sharan got a taste of hardware and embedded programming, and also met Shashwath.

Mindgrove's journey so far has been made possible by a unique government - academia - industry collaboration. The semiconductor industry itself is a global industry and such collaborations have yielded high returns for countries like Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan in the last few decades.

Indian Bank Ties with IIT-Madras for Funding Startups by Offering Loans Upto ₹50 Crore

Chennai-headquartered Indian Bank has introduced an initiative for funding startups, 'IND Spring Board', in collaboration with the IIT-Madras Incubation Cell (IITMIC). 

Under the partnership, IITMIC will refer startups with proven technology and established cash flows to the bank and also extend advisory to the bank on the business model. The bank will offer an exclusive credit facility of up to Rs.50 crore for startups in order to fulfil their capital requirements and purchase of machinery and equipment.

The bank's Managing Director and CEO Padmaja Chunduru said, "It is a known fact that banks find it difficult to fund start-ups as they do not meet the requirements under traditional models of financing. Business models involving high technology, lack of visibility of cash flows, high burn rate and high failure rate make the due diligence process for assessing viability difficult for banks. As a result, this segment has been almost completely funded by seed capital, or private equity from India/abroad."

Startups were depending more on equity and they had to share profit and ownership of the company to venture capital firms, private equity players or angel investors for mobilizing funds, she said.

However, in case of debt, the start-up just needs to pay interest and principal to the bank. Debt was missing in the startup ecosystem and entrepreneurs were missing this working capital finance and equipment finance, she said.

"This initiative, we believe, will be the spring board for start-ups to realise their ambitions. We see this collaboration as a perfect fit both for the bank and IITMIC," Chunduru added.

Established in 1907, Indian Bank is 113 year-old bank having made business of US$60 billion as on 31 March 2019. In April this year, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that Allahabad Bank would be merged with Indian bank. The proposed merger would create the seventh largest public sector bank in the country with assets of ₹8.08 lakh crore (US$110 billion).