Fabless Chip Startup Vervesemi Raises $10M
Vervesemi, a fabless semiconductor startup, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round. The company focuses on developing custom silicon for edge and AI applications. This investment reinforces the industry trend toward domain-specific, low-power, and potentially RISC-V-compatible chip designs.
- The Series A funding round was led by investor Ashish Kacholia and Unicorn India Ventures, with participation from Roots Ventures, Caperize Fina, and MAIQ Growth Scheme. - Vervesemi was the first startup approved under the Government of India's Design Linked Incentive (DLI) Scheme, which provides financial support to domestic semiconductor design companies. - The company was founded in 2017 by CEO Rakesh Malik and CTO Pratap Narayan Singh, both industry veterans with extensive experience at global semiconductor firms like STMicroelectronics. - Vervesemi is actively developing chips for the aerospace and defense sectors; a data acquisition avionic chip is currently under evaluation with a space customer, and a precision motor-control chip for drones utilizes an indigenous RISC-V microprocessor. - The company's technology integrates machine learning into its analog and mixed-signal designs to enable self-healing and fail-safe mechanisms, enhancing reliability in mission-critical environments. - The open-source nature of the RISC-V architecture, which Vervesemi employs, is gaining traction in aerospace because it allows for full inspection of the register-transfer level (RTL) code, enabling verifiable security for trusted components in sensitive applications. - The new capital is intended to accelerate the commercial rollout of its chip portfolio, expand its IP catalog, and scale its engineering and application teams. - Vervesemi holds a portfolio of over 140 semiconductor IPs, 25 IC products, and 10 granted patents, with strategic partnerships within the Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE) and as a UMC IP alliance partner.
