Sunil Cavale and Vishal Katariya on the evolving chip startup landscape in India

In today’s episode, I bring you a conversation with Sunil Cavale at Speciale Invest and Vishal Katariya at Ankur Capital, both VC firms well known as early-stage backers of deep tech startups in India.

Vishal and Sunil discuss their recent report on the Semiconductor Startup Landscape in India.

India’s chip industry has made significant strides from being only a location for the development centres of global companies, designing to foreign specifications.

Today, a new cohort of founders — professors spinning out decades of research, veterans of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, and second‑time chip entrepreneurs — is trying to build products, not just provide services. Their targets range from high‑volume microcontrollers for cameras and smart meters to AI accelerators for data centres and the edge.

Venture capital is following. Seed rounds are giving way to briskly timed Series-A investments, some closing within 18 months of the seed funding and at two to ten times the earlier cheque sizes. Capital is also broadening beyond specialist funds: family offices, strategic corporates like Zoho and the venture arms of global chipmakers now want a role in the India semicon story.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are pushing beyond fabless design into manufacturing‑adjacent niches such as metrology tools, lithography subsystems and low‑volume prototyping — hedging against the geopolitical fragility of a supply chain still concentrated in Taiwan and the Netherlands.

This week’s conversation brings together two investors who have had a ringside view of these shifts. Sunil and Vishal have spent the past few years swapping notes on deals, founders, failures and successes. Out of those conversations that started during one fateful meeting at a McDonald’s in Ghatkopar, in Mumbai, came their Semiconductor Startup Landscape in India report, first presented at IIT Bombay’s SemiX conference.

Rather than rehearse well-known talking points, they have tried to document what is actually happening on the ground: who the founders are, where the money originates, which verticals are getting crowded and where the genuine white spaces lie. In this episode, they explain why India’s chip moment may finally be real — and what it will take to sustain it.

Link to the report at Speciale Invest:
https://www.specialeinvest.com/community?pgid=mdx2tvo7-e24d7063-961f-4de4-b405-ce9282527498

Link to the report at Ankur Capital:
https://www.ankurcapital.com/post/semiconductor-startup-landscape-in-india-2025-perspective