Bharat Innovates Spotlights India’s Chip-Design Startups

From edge-AI silicon to GaN radar chips, the homegrown companies betting on “Design in India” get their moment at Bharat Innovates 2026

Of the 120 deep-tech ventures India has flown to the Bharat Innovates 2026 conclave in Nice, one cohort carries outsized symbolic weight: seven fabless semiconductor-design startups, exhibiting under the event’s dedicated “Semiconductors” pillar. Their presence marks a shift in how India pitches itself to the world — not just as a country that assembles and packages chips, but one that designs them. The cohort sits within a broader government push: under the Design Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme and the Chips to Startup programme, the Ministry of Electronics and IT had approved 23 chip-design projects and supported more than 70 firms with tools and infrastructure by January 2026.

Leading the pack is Netrasemi, the Thiruvananthapuram-based startup backed by Zoho and Unicorn India Ventures with around ₹125 crore raised to date. Its A2000 chip, fabricated on a 12nm process at TSMC, is billed as India’s first indigenous edge-AI system-on-chip, built for surveillance cameras, drones and robotics, with commercial volumes targeted for 2027.

Agnit Semiconductors, based in Bengaluru, is showcasing gallium-nitride (GaN) radio-frequency chips — a technology that outperforms silicon on efficiency and power density. The company already has pilots running with domestic defence public-sector units and private military firms, and expects to ship between 5,000 and 10,000 chips over the next six to nine months for radar and electronic-warfare systems.

Vervesemi Microelectronics, with operations in Greater Noida and Bengaluru, designs analog and mixed-signal ICs — data converters, RF transceivers and power-management chips for aerospace, EV, defence and industrial use. It holds the distinction of being the first company approved under the DLI scheme, raised $10 million in a Series A round in January 2026, and counts ISRO’s Gaganyaan programme and EV inverter systems among its applications. Its BLDC motor-controller project was personally awarded by Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw last year.

BigEndian Semiconductors, founded by a team with backgrounds at ARM, Broadcom and Intel, has completed the tape-out of its first chip — a system-on-chip for surveillance equipment — and raised $6 million in a pre-Series A round in May 2026, bringing its total funding to roughly $9 million.

Morphing Machines, a spinout from IISc Bengaluru, is presenting REDEFINE, a runtime-reconfigurable many-core processor aimed at data centres, AI workloads and telecom infrastructure. The company recently closed its Series A at ₹80 crore to fund its first production chip.

Ananant Systems, founded in 2023 by former Qualcomm chief LTE/5G modem architect Chitu Singh alongside Sarita Singh, is developing semiconductor IP and chips for 5G and 6G wireless connectivity — explicitly modelling itself on the Qualcomm and MediaTek playbook, but built and owned in India.

Rounding out the group, MumbaiSemi is a fabless designer of RF, analog, mixed-signal and digital ICs, with its DhruvaPro chip pitched as the first indigenous reconfigurable RFIC supporting multiple satellite-navigation constellations — NavIC, GPS, Galileo and BeiDou — for autonomous vehicles and defence applications.

The semiconductor cohort’s pitches are being heard by a speaker line-up stacked with industry weight: Tata Electronics’ senior VP Rajesh Nair, Applied Materials’ global ventures head Anand Kamannavar, and NXP’s automotive systems chief Sebastien Clamagirand are all on the Bharat Innovates agenda. Taken together, the signal from Nice is that India’s chip-design ecosystem — long strong on talent but thin on product companies — is now being positioned to feed directly into the assembly, testing and fabrication capacity coming online at Sanand, Jagiroad and Dholera, closing the loop on the “Design in India, Make in India” pitch.