Despite being home to 20% of the world’s chip designers, India lacks a significant presence in the global semiconductor market. But in recent months, the Indian government has begun investing in efforts to establish India in semiconductors as companies around the world seek alternatives to China and adopt “China Plus One” strategies.
BigEndian Semiconductors aims to capitalize on this shift by starting to develop surveillance chips for cameras.
Founded in May, the Bangalore-based fabless design startup is led by CEO Sunil Kumar, a former ARM Broadcom and Intel executive, with the rest of the founding team having experience at chipmakers such as Broadcom and Cypress Semiconductors.
Kumar told TechCrunch that Big Endian’s founding members had known each other for 25 years, but decided to form a startup after seeing big spending in the country (about 50 million cameras, worth $4-5 billion a year) coupled with incentives from the Indian government and customers looking for alternatives to China.
“If we don’t do that, this generation will die and disappear. There’s no one else who can go through that whole cycle,” Kumar said in an interview.
India has set aside $9 billion to boost domestic development of semiconductor and display manufacturing companies. The Modi government has approved four semiconductor factories in the country to produce chips for automotive, home appliances, electric vehicles, industrial and telecom applications. According to government estimates, these four factories will attract investments of around $17.9 billion and have the capacity to produce around 70 million chips per day.
Meanwhile, four-month-old BigEndian is initially planning to work with Taiwanese manufacturer UMC for its monitoring chips, with a reference chip based on the 28nm node process set to be released in the first quarter of 2025. The startup also plans to expand its presence over time and target the overall IoT market, which is primarily driven by 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers.
Unlike traditional fabless semiconductor companies, BigEndian is working to build a platform-as-a-service model that will help governments avoid access to Chinese-made middleware common in existing surveillance solutions. The model offers software solutions that help manufacturers and customers customize the behavior of their surveillance cameras. The startup can increase revenue by offering these customizations as subscription add-ons.
“In India, we consume about a billion of these chipsets a year,” Kumar says, “but these are all chipsets that cost between 50 cents and a dollar. If you look at the emerging automotive space, there are a lot of 32-bit controllers in cars today. But you can’t get into all these spaces on day one in India because it’s hard to get funding.”
First, BigEndian raised $3 million in an all-equity seed round led by Vertex Ventures SEA and India. While the seed funding isn’t enough for a fabless semiconductor startup to fulfill large orders, Kumar argued that the Indian government’s incentives for the industry have given the roughly 16-person company a boost that “is almost like raising $5 million.”
“This is a country that has not had much success in semiconductors, so the chances of raising funds at this stage are very slim. If I were in the US, I could have actually raised closer to 12-15 million, but that’s not possible here, so we have to work within the constraints. That’s the challenge. That’s probably going to be a barrier to entry for us and other competitors,” he said.
Strategic investors including Amitabh Nagpal, head of startup business development at Amazon Web Services, also participated in the round, which will likely position the startup to raise larger funding in its next round.
BigEndian also plans to expand beyond India into the market for its surveillance chips, which are aimed at powering a wide range of mid- to low-end cameras.
“Our goal is to create your flagship business and prove to the market that an Indian silicon company can work its way up the food chain and not just from the top down,” Kumar said.
