Semicon Startup Netrasemi Raises Rs 10 Crore From Unicorn India Ventures

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 internet of things products. The funds raised will be used for fabrication of two machine learning system-on-chips (Netra A2000 and Netra R1000), the company said. 

Founded in 2020 by Jyothis Indirabhai, Sreejith Varma and Deepa Geetha, Netrasemi is a semiconductor technology company building SOCs to enable optimal computing for smart IoT products. These chips go into motherboards enabling the products to do advanced AI-based analytics without the need for sending the data to servers and the cloud. 

In the last 12 months, the company has received encouraging responses from large OEMS across various countries operating in medical, telecom and industrial segments. It has started generating strong revenue growth and profits of approximately $0.75 million from chip design and porting service for partners.

Netrasemi has designed three SoC families: Netra-R1000, Netra-A2000 and Netra-A4000. The ML-capable chips are built on Netrasemi DSA and feature graph-stream hardware acceleration architecture. 

Jyothis Indirabhai, co-founder of Netrasemi, said, “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.”

The key target segments of Netra SOCs are surveillance, smart sensors, smart infrastructure, machine vision and industry 4.0, robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles.

Anil Joshi, managing partner, Unicorn India Ventures, said, “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.”