The fabless semiconductor design startup Mindgrove Technologies announced that it has completed a Series A funding round raising $8 million.

Rocketship.vc and Speciale Invest are co-leading the round, which also includes participation from Mela Ventures, Peak XV Partners, Nishchay Goel, Whiteboard Capital, and Anshul Goel.

The company plans to improve internal engineering capabilities and grow its workforce with the help of this capital investment. Additionally, the investment will quicken the first chip's production and sales.

The business introduced "Secure IoT" earlier in May 2024, which is India's first high-performance, commercial-grade microcontroller System-on-Chip (SoC) taped out at 28 nm. It is intended to power devices like printers and point-of-sale (PoS) machines in addition to electronic gadgets that are evolving into "smart" connected devices such as watches, meters, locks, and access control units. The chip is on schedule to reach the market by mid-2025.

Furthermore, Mindgrove was given permission to develop a new chip called Vision SoC under the government of India's semiconductor Design-Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme, which is worth Rs 15 crore. This is intended for use in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), smart TVs, CCTV cameras, dashcams, and video recorders—applications involving high-performance edge computing and vision processing.

Mindgrove Technologies CEO Shashwath T R stated, "The recent investment and the DLI scheme reaffirms confidence in our thesis and capabilities."

"There is a growing demand in India for high-performance SoCs with critical features for edge computing and security," he continued. In an effort to address this need, we have been actively working to introduce designed-in-India chips to the market.