Chennai: Shashwath T. R., co-founder and chief executive of Chennai-based semiconductor startup Mindgrove Technologies, sounds hopeful.
“Our chip is out of the lab,” he says. “We are coming out of the lab and into the industry.”
Since late 2024, Mindgrove’s engineers have been chasing a singular goal: perfecting a dedicated ‘vision system-on-chip’ tailored for security hardware. That persistence scored its first breakthrough this June, when the five-year-old venture struck an alliance with Prama India to integrate its homegrown silicon directly into the domestic company’s CCTV cameras and surveillance networks.
What created an opening for Mindgrove was a policy change in CCTV rules. In April 2024, the Indian government introduced several requirements for security reasons, including disclosure of the origin of critical components such as the chip. From 1 April 2026, non-certified imported cameras could no longer be sold, effectively shutting Chinese brands such as Hikvision and Dahua from the internet-connected CCTV market.
But even a mandate can only do so much. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) is not an immediate commercial order. The prototype is expected by the end of the year, after which Prama will have to qualify the product before a commercial order can be placed.
Another startup, BigEndian, is building what its co-founder and chief executive Sunil Kumar calls a “camera silicon prototype”. The two-year-old is also stitching up an ecosystem of design and manufacturing partners in Taiwan.
Many mass-market electronics brands in India source components from China and assemble them into products. “They will not be able to shift to a new chip easily,” Kumar says. BigEndian’s Taiwan ecosystem is intended to make that transition easier by giving customers a configurable end product.
BigEndian started work on its chip architecture in September 2024 and sent its chip blueprint to a manufacturing foundry in Taiwan in January this year. The first silicon was expected in July and is now arriving in September; the prototype is expected to be ready around November. Any revenue, realistically, would only be generated around April 2027, roughly three years after work on the chip began.
Both Mindgrove and BigEndian are fabless chip companies—they design chips but rely on specialist manufacturers to produce them. The two companies illustrate the challenge facing India’s youngest crop of such startups. They have spent significant amounts of capital getting their chips from design to production. And now they must find customers that could help them scale.
The CCTV policy change was an exception that created demand—it was a ‘stick’ approach, not a carrot. The larger question is whether Indian original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are genuinely interested in India-built chips. And does it even make economic sense? Won’t they be seduced by cheaper alternatives from Taiwan and China?
For the startups and their investors, timing is crucial. How long can young companies afford to wait for the market to make the switch?
Their first few years of building chips have exposed many gaps, from dependence on foreign-owned intellectual property (IP) and design software to reliance on global foundries and suppliers where they have little bargaining power. These add to the time, cost and uncertainty of getting an India-designed chip into a product.
While India has spent substantial policy capital helping create this generation of chip companies, the ecosystem they need to scale remains incomplete.
First, let’s take a peek at how chip policies evolved.
Around 2007, the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, then led by Poornima Shenoy, started pressing the central government for a policy to make chips in India. The rationale back then was the same as you hear today—India needs its own chip ecosystem for strategic autonomy, and to save on precious foreign exchange. Over the next many years, consortiums to make fabs emerged and fizzled out, largely because they either couldn’t find customers or close the required funding.
