BigEndian Semiconductors, a fabless semiconductor design startup has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Vertex Ventures SEA & India.
The funds will be used to expand the engineering team, strengthen research and development, and scale operations.
“This investment enables us to accelerate our journey of disrupting the value chain with open, secure, and collaborative technology. Besides our SoCs, we are also building an advanced, truly Indian ecosystem with upstream and downstream innovations, which would be transformative in the nascent Indian semiconductors industry,” said Sunil Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of BigEndian.
“Realignment of electronics supply chains has provided a rare opportunity for India to become a global leader in semiconductors. We are excited to be a part of this macro trend, starting with our investment in BigEndian. Their approach to developing a surveillance SoC aligns perfectly with the growing demand for advanced security solutions globally, and the founding team has all the elements that point to BigEndian becoming a future leader in the global semiconductor industry,” said Ben Mathias, Managing Partner of Vertex Ventures SEA & India.
Founded in 2024 by Sunil Kumar (CEO), Renuka Prasad (Head of System Engineering), Harpreet Wadhawan (CFO), Dinesh Annayya (Head of Silicon Engineering), Kanagaraju Ponnusamy (Head of Engineering), and Jansen Cheng (Head of Global Business Development). The company currently has approximately 18 employees.
The Bangalore-based startup aims to create indigenous semiconductor intellectual property in India and introduce its surveillance system-on-chip (SoC) solution. The SoC will be built on a 28nm node process and is expected to be ready in the first quarter of 2025, in collaboration with Taiwanese fab company UMC. The company plans to extend its offerings beyond surveillance chips to the broader IoT market, focusing on 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers.
BigEndian joins a growing list of fabless semiconductor startups that have recently secured significant funding in the industry. Morphing Machines raised $2.76 million in its seed round led by Speciale Invest in June this year, while InCore Semiconductor secured $3 million from Peak XV in early 2023.