As AI data centers reach their power limits, Peak XV supports Indian startup C2i to address bottlenecks.

Power, rather than compute, is quickly becoming the limiting factor in scaling AI data centers. This change led Peak XV Partners to support C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup building plug-and-play system-level power solutions designed to reduce energy losses and improve the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure.

C2i (short for Control Transformation and Intelligence) has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the two-year-old startup’s total funding to $19 million.

This investment comes as data center energy demand accelerates globally. Power consumption in data centers is expected to nearly triple by 2035, according to a December 2025 report from BloombergNEF, and Goldman Sachs Research estimates that power demand in data centers could surge 175% by 2030 from 2023 levels. This equates to the addition of the top 10 electricity-consuming countries.

Most of this burden comes from efficiently converting electricity within the data center rather than generating it. In data centers, high-voltage power must be stepped down thousands of times before it reaches the GPU. Preetam Tadeparthy, co-founder and CTO of C2i, said in an interview that this process currently wastes about 15 to 20 percent of energy.

“What used to be 400V has already moved to 800V and is likely to go even higher,” Tadeparthy told TechCrunch.

Founded in 2024 by former Texas Instruments power executives Ram Anant, Vikram Gakhar, Preetam Tadeparthy and Dattatreya Suryanarayana along with Harsha S. B and Muthusubramanian N. V, C2i is redesigning power delivery into a single plug-and-play “grid-to-GPU” system that extends from the data center bus to the processor itself.

C2i estimates that by handling power conversion, control, and packaging as an integrated platform, end-to-end losses can be reduced by approximately 10% (approximately 100 kW saved per megawatt consumed) with knock-on effects on cooling costs, GPU utilization, and overall data center economics.

“It all translates directly to total cost of ownership, revenue and profitability,” Tadeparthy said.

For Peak Rajan Anandan, managing director at the venture firm, told TechCrunch that after the initial capital investment in servers and facilities, energy costs become the dominant ongoing cost of a data center, so incremental efficiency gains are also very valuable.

“If you can reduce your energy costs by 10 to 30 percent, that’s a huge number,” Anandan said. “You’re talking about tens of billions of dollars.”

Claims are tested quickly. According to Tadeparthy, C2i expects the first two silicon designs to return from manufacturing between April and June, after which it plans to validate performance with data center operators and hyperscalers that have requested data review.

The Bengaluru-based startup has assembled a team of around 65 engineers and is gearing up for customer-facing operations in the US and Taiwan as it prepares for initial deployment.

Power delivery is one of the most entrenched parts of the data center stack, and has long been dominated by large incumbents with deep balance sheets and years of qualification cycles. While many startups focus on improving individual components, redesigning power delivery from top to bottom requires simultaneous adjustments to silicon, packaging, and system architecture. This is a capital-intensive approach that few startups attempt and can take years to prove in a production environment.

Anandan said the real problem now is execution. He pointed out that all startups face technical, market and team risks when betting on how their industry will develop. For C2i, the feedback loop must be relatively short, he said. “We will know in the next six months,” Anandan said, pointing to upcoming silicon and early customer validation as moments when the thesis will be tested.

This bet also reflects how India’s semiconductor design ecosystem has matured in recent years.

“The way you should look at semiconductors in India is like e-commerce in 2008,” Anandan said. “It’s just getting started.”

He pointed to the depth of engineering talent, with a growing proportion of global chip designers based domestically, along with government-backed design-linked incentives that lower the cost and risk of tape-out, making it increasingly feasible for startups to build globally competitive semiconductor products in India rather than operating solely from captive design centres.

Whether these conditions translate into globally competitive products will become clearer in the coming months as C2i begins validating system-level power solutions with customers.