CraftifAI Raises $3M for Embedded Systems AI Tools
CraftifAI, a startup building AI tools for embedded software engineers, has raised $3 million in seed funding. The company aims to serve a niche segment of India's engineering base that it believes is underserved by mainstream AI tool providers. The funding round was led by Ankur Capital and others.
- The company was founded in 2025 by Pratik Sharda, former product lead for PhonePe's payment devices, and Yashwant Dagar, a former system design engineer at Xilinx-AMD and Sima.ai. Their firsthand experience with the inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the embedded software industry directly led to the creation of CraftifAI. - CraftifAI is developing "CraftifAI Orbit," an agentic AI platform designed to automate the embedded software development lifecycle. The platform aims to reduce development time and costs by simplifying tasks like generating hardware-optimized code and deploying AI/ML models. - The startup is addressing a significant talent gap, with only about 2.5 million embedded software engineers globally to meet the demands of a market projected to grow from 16 billion connected devices in 2023 to over 41 billion by 2030. - A key goal for the company is to eliminate hardware vendor lock-in, a long-standing issue in the embedded systems industry that restricts developers' flexibility. - The funding will be used to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams to serve a global clientele across various sectors, including robotics, drones, industrial IoT, and automotive. - Other investors in the seed round include IvyCap Ventures, Capital-A, and Antler. - CraftifAI has already initiated pilot projects with several Indian original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in fields like robotics, drones, and IoT, as well as with a publicly listed semiconductor company in the United States. - Ankur Capital's investment thesis centers on the inflection point in the embedded software market, driven by the convergence of AI, the proliferation of edge hardware, and the shortage of specialized engineering talent.
