Netrasemi

Netrasemi is a fabless semiconductor company founded in 2020 by semiconductor industry veterans Jyothis Indirabhai (CEO), Sreejith Varma (CTO), and Deepa Geetha (COO). Based in Thiruvananthapuram, India, the company specializes in developing power-efficient, domain-specific system-on-chips (SoCs) designed to embed artificial intelligence in edge devices. The founders' extensive experience in designing and qualifying semiconductor chips for leading companies and startups underpins Netrasemi's mission to make chip-enabled product development more efficient and economical.

The company's business model revolves around designing and selling these specialized SoCs and providing a comprehensive technology stack that includes in-house silicon intellectual properties (IPs), AI development tools, flexible Software Development Kits (SDKs), and platform reference designs. This full-stack approach allows original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and IoT solution providers to accelerate their go-to-market strategies with cost-effective and power-optimized AI chipsets. Netrasemi targets a wide array of market segments, including surveillance, industrial robotics, smart infrastructure, machine vision, automotive, and smart home devices.

Netrasemi's product portfolio is built on a patented heterogeneous parallel processing and graph-stream architecture, ensuring high performance and power efficiency. The company has developed several SoC families, including the NETRA A2000 for vision applications and the NETRA R1000, a microcontroller-based AI SoC. These chips, fabricated by TSMC on a 12nm process node, integrate components like a neural processing unit (NPU), vision processing unit (VPU), and image signal processor (ISP) to handle complex workloads like video processing and AI-based analytics directly on the device. This eliminates the need to send data to the cloud, making devices more responsive and secure. The company has secured significant funding to advance its mission, including a Series A round of $12.5 million led by Zoho Corporation and Unicorn India Ventures, bringing its total funding to approximately $14.5 million. The investment will be used to scale R&D, expand manufacturing, and bring new SoC variants into production.

Keywords: system-on-chip, fabless semiconductor, edge AI, IoT devices, neural processing unit, silicon IP, computer vision, video analytics, machine learning chips, smart cameras, industrial automation, RISC-V, deep learning, embedded systems, intelligent devices, domain-specific architecture, semiconductor design, robotics, smart infrastructure, automotive systems