Kerala-based semiconductor startup Netrasemi raises Rs. 10 crore in a Pre Series A round of funding from Unicorn India Ventures. The fund will help Netrasemi to build Edge AI for IoT products, and for fabrication of two ML SoC chips (Netra A2000 and Netra R1000).
Founded by Jyothis Indirabhai, Sreejith Varma and Deepa Geetha in 2020, the startup builds SoCs and system-on-modules (SoMs) supported with a versatile AI software design framework to address the new-age need for optimal computing for smart IoT products. The firm claims to bring a family of AI/ML capable SOCs and reference designs for solving 100+ AI/ML use cases making Edge AI product development efficient, simple and economical. These chips go into motherboards that make these products capable of doing advanced AI-based analytics without the need for sending the data to servers and the cloud hence, making them smart, cheap, responsive and independent.
Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, says, “There are attractive opportunities in the Edge AI software market and there is absolutely no denying that the AI industry has the potential to transform various sectors. The funding accelerates Netrasemi’s mission to deploy the solutions on a better scale. We believe Netrasemi will continue to sustain its momentum with its most powerful AI chip for edge devices and strengthen its position in this space. The company has witnessed remarkable progress in the last 12 months and has designed new solutions. Hence, we believe the market opportunity is huge and the company has built the right momentum to capitalise on this segment.”
Netrasemi has designed 3 SoC (System on Chip) family- Netra-R1000, Netra-A2000 and Netra-A4000. All three chips are high-performance ML-capable chips built on an efficient Netrasemi DSA (Domain Specific Architecture) and feature companies’ patented graph-stream hardware acceleration architecture. The chips are designed based on various end-customer application requirements and are very power-efficient as well as optimally priced, to be useful for the edge market. Netrasemi chips can enable solution players to develop advanced ML and vision application use cases faster and with ease.
Jyothis Indirabhai, Co-founder Netrasemi, says, “Netrasemi family of chips will be the first AI/ML SoCs from India for intelligent edge devices, with a full array of digital IPs inhouse developed. We not only own the chip but also own what goes inside. We are excited to be backed by Unicorn India Ventures and believe this funding will play a crucial step for us to fuel our continued expansion and success.”
The key target segments of Netra SOCs are surveillance, smart sensors, smart infrastructure, machine vision & industry 4.0, robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles. As the demand for security cameras are surging due to privacy concerns and smart city initiatives, Netrasemi aims to target the market that includes different types of video surveillance among end-user verticals such as government, industrial, BFSI, transportation, and others.
