Bengaluru: Semiconductor's startup Sandlogic is in talks early on with $200 million in funding, with $30-400,000 in funding.
Based in Bengaluru, Sandlogic is one of the few chip builders in India targeting commercial grade artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The company has already appointed an investment banker, with domestic and foreign venture capitalists approaching, one of the two said on condition of anonymity.
Founded in 2018 by Kamalakar Devaki, Jesusdas Fernandez, Radica Kanigilli and Rabbi Kumar Rana, the Texas and Bengaluru-based company entered Enterprise AI and started as a low-code/no-code platform before designing its own chip prototype. The low-power Krsna chip aims to promote AI on devices, and has already achieved 22 trillion operations (TOPS).
Devaki declined to comment on the funding round.
AI chip startups have been gaining interest from investors this year. Raised by Kerala-based Netrasemi £With 107 crores in Series A funding led by Zoho and Unicorn India Ventures, Maieutic Semiconductors of Bengaluru secured roughly $4.15 million in seed money from Endiya Partners and Exfinity. SandLogic previously raised about $3.5 million from Net-heavy individuals and several angel investors, including Google and AT&T executives.
Exslerate V2 is the underlying chip design for SandLogic and can be reused and scaled. It is intended to perform AI tasks faster while using less than 2W of power, and the company says it is ready for commercial use by December 2026. The KrSNA chip is built on its design, and is currently under prototyping, with a test chip planned for the third quarter of FY27, Devaki said. It is intended for AI applications such as image, language, audio processing, and is designed for use in small devices without heating.
“These chips can increase the battery life of small devices and run AI algorithms on devices like smartwatches, home infotainment devices, home routers, televisions, and mobile phones,” says Devaki.
Semiconductor bets rise
Investor benefits range from deep technology experts such as Speciale Invest. £600 crore funds include early-stage deep technology startups, including AI and semiconductors, and global investors like Celesta Capital, which operates on semiconductor and AI infrastructure betting.
Other investors include venture capital (VC) funds, including Endya Partners, Unicorn India Ventures and 3ONE4 Capital. Among the foreign VCs, Celesta Capital remains active across semiconductor and AI infrastructure, with large multi-stage VCs such as Peak XV Partners, Accel, Lightspeed and Elevation Capital leading or participating in this year's new AI and Agent AI round.
According to Devaki, Shakti is SandLogic's In-house Large Language Model (LLM) built for enterprise use, with up to 4 billion and 8 billion parameters released. Simply put, the parameters are dials within the AI model that learns tuning. In general, more parameters allow the model to handle more complex tasks.
SandLogic sells an “agent AI” layer to businesses on top of these models. “We started giving it to banks, healthcare companies, manufacturing companies,” Devaki says.
