For decades, India’s semiconductor industry resembled an architect designing villas for others while living in a rented flat. The country’s semiconductor engineers, who constitute approximately 20 percent (a widely accepted industry estimate) of the global chip-design workforce, have long generated intellectual property for foreign titans while India remained dependent on imports for its own consumption.
A new generation of chip design startups is now on the rise and their commercial trajectories, like that of Mindgrove Technologies, suggest the tenants are finally building their own estate. Sticking with Mindgrove for this piece, by securing high-volume integrations with local manufacturers, the IIT Madras-incubated venture is fast moving from lab to market.
Mindgrove has just announced a memorandum of understanding with Prama India, a leading domestic surveillance company, marking a transition from laboratory validation to real-world volume. Prama will integrate Mindgrove’s Vision SoC — a GHz-class processor funded under the government’s Design Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme — across its commercial security product line, according to a press release.
This represents an instance of an Indian fabless startup successfully navigating the “valley of death” between a prototype and a mass-market production line, targeting a segment where reliability and security are paramount. Fingers crossed that there will be more and in greater frequency.
Note for example, HrdWyr, backed by Ideaspring Capital, will soon ship a processor that domestic consumer electronics company boAt has already signed on to buy as an anchor customer.
India’s semiconductor startups are attempting to carve out a space for themselves in a global market that is projected to exceed $1.3 trillion this year, even as the industry fragments along geopolitical fault lines. Note the latest memory chip shortage and its repercussions.
As a “Silicon Curtain” of export controls and supply-chain de-risking descends between Western powers and Chinese manufacturing hubs, major economies are racing to secure “trusted” digital infrastructure. India is positioning itself as a resilient third pole in this realignment, tapping the open-source RISC-V architecture to build sovereign hardware that is immune to unilateral licensing restrictions.
“For Indian fabless semiconductor companies, credibility is built when products leave the lab and enter sustained deployment. This engagement validates our Vision SoC as a production-ready platform capable of meeting performance, reliability, and scale requirements in real-world security systems,” Shashwath TR, Mindgrove’s co-founder and CEO said in the press release.
Mindgrove’s deal with Prama follows its commercial partnership with Pinetics, which focuses on integrating Mindgrove’s SoCs into a broader range of commercial applications, including biometric access control systems, smart locks, and camera solutions. By extending the now production-ready Secure IoT chip into specific modules and products, the collaboration aims to create a more complete, domestic electronics stack.
In 2025 Mindgrove also teamed up with Bosch Global Software Technologies (BGSW) in an agreement that saw the startup supplying chips and boards for field testing in automotive and industrial environments, winning a stamp of approval from a global heavyweight. This collaboration allowed Mindgrove to refine its software stack and prove its silicon’s reliability under the stringent safety standards of industrial automation.
“Our collaboration with Mindgrove marks an important milestone in advancing indigenous semiconductor capabilities for next generation video security solutions,” Ashish P Dhakan, Managing Director and CEO, Prama India, said in the press release. “By combining Mindgrove’s semiconductor design expertise with Prama’s extensive experience in video security, product engineering, compliance, and large-scale deployments, we aim to develop world-class solutions that are secure, scalable, and globally competitive.”
Beyond technology development, this collaboration will help build strategic capabilities within India’s semiconductor ecosystem, foster innovation, strengthen supply-chain resilience, and support the Government of India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat vision in critical technology sectors, Dhakan notes.
This all could mean accelerated commercialisation for Mindgrove’s chips — it has two platforms currently, one for Secure IoT, and the other, the Vision SoC — and encouragement for the chip design company to lean into its product development plans. For India, this is another small, but important step forward in building a local semiconductor product ecosystem.
