Netrasemi: India's Bet on Edge AI Semiconductors

For decades, the global semiconductor industry had defined unwritten roles for countries, with cutting-edge chip design happening in the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. India produced the talent who built those chips abroad. Netrasemi, a fabless semiconductor startup based out of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, is working to redefine those unwritten roles. Netrasemi, instead of assembling chips designed abroad or licensing external architecture, is designing original silicon. It owns the intellectual property entirely and is working towards commercial production from a research park in one of India’s lesser-known technology hubs.

The Problem That Started Everything

Netrasemi was founded on a specific observation: AI inference running on remote servers creates structural dependency for industries where real-time decisions are non-negotiable. Security cameras, autonomous drones, industrial sensors, and automotive vision systems cannot afford the latency, bandwidth consumption, and connectivity dependency that cloud-based processing introduces.

Netrasemi designs Edge AI System-on-Chips, which are processors capable of running complex AI workloads directly on the device without transmitting data to a remote server. Every calculation happens locally, in real time, on hardware small enough to embed inside a camera, a drone, or an industrial sensor. The architecture removes the round trip between device and cloud entirely, which matters most in environments where connectivity is unreliable, privacy is non-negotiable, and response times are measured in milliseconds.

The global edge AI hardware market was valued at approximately $26.14 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $58.90 billion by 2030, according to MarketsandMarkets, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 17.6% during the forecast period. A separate analysis by Grand View Research estimates the broader edge AI market will grow from $24.9 billion in 2025 to $118.7 billion by 2033, at a CAGR of 21.7%. Netrasemi is building for that market using its entirely owned intellectual property.

The A2000 and What It Represents

In May, Netrasemi launched the A2000, a production-ready edge AI processor developed using 12-nanometre process technology. It was widely reported as India’s first indigenous AI system-on-chip to reach this stage of development. Customer trials have begun with clients in the surveillance and automotive sectors, with commercial production targeted for 2027.

The A2000 is designed for applications including smart surveillance, autonomous drones, robotics, and automotive vision systems. The processor handles computer vision, object detection, and real-time inference workloads at the device level across deployment environments ranging from traffic-monitoring infrastructure to industrial quality-control systems.

CEO Jyothis Indirabhai has consistently positioned full IP ownership as central to Netrasemi’s long-term competitive architecture. Owning the underlying intellectual property determines pricing power, customisation capability, and the company’s ability to serve clients with sector-specific requirements that licensed designs cannot accommodate.

Patronage from Both Investors and Government

Netrasemi has raised approximately ₹107 crore in Series A funding from Zoho and Unicorn India Ventures. Zoho’s participation carries particular weight. The company built one of India’s most successful enterprise technology businesses without relying on foreign capital or acquisition-led growth, and its decision to back Netrasemi reflects confidence in the long-term architecture of an independently built, IP-owning semiconductor company.

The startup operates under the Government of India’s Design Linked Incentive Scheme, administered by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India. The DLI Scheme is a programme specifically structured to support domestic semiconductor design capability. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw visited the Netrasemi team in February 2026 as part of a broader review of DLI Scheme participants. The visit was seen as a sign of the company’s rapidly growing position within India’s national semiconductor development agenda.

Why It Matters Now

India’s semiconductor policy has focused heavily on attracting foreign fabrication facilities and assembly operations. Netrasemi occupies a different position from the policy. It is creating original semiconductor intellectual property within India across the full design cycle, from architecture through silicon bring-up to commercial readiness.

The founders, Jyothis Indirabhai, Deepa Geetha, and Sreejith Varma, have built, through a combination of government support, institutional investment, and sustained technical development in a market where established players have had decades’ worth of head start to optimise and innovate, building a competitive advantage in the process. Reaching production-ready silicon at 12 nanometres, with active customer trials underway, places Netrasemi at a stage of development India’s fabless design ecosystem has rarely reached with its own indigenously developed IP.

The A2000’s commercial success across its target sectors will determine the company’s next phase. The broader question it would answer is whether India can produce semiconductor companies that compete on original design rather than solely on cost arbitrage.