India has 20% of the world’s chip designers but has not gained a significant presence in the global semiconductor market. However, in recent months, the Indian government has begun investing in efforts to establish the country in the semiconductor sector as global companies adopt the “China plus one” strategy to find alternatives to China.
BigEndian Semiconductors aims to capitalize on this shift by starting to develop surveillance chips for cameras.
Founded in May, the Bengaluru-based Fabless design startup is led by CEO Sunil Kumar, a former ARM, Broadcom and Intel executive, while the rest of the founding team has experience at chipmakers such as Broadcom and Cypress Semiconductors.
Kumar told TechCrunch that BigEndian’s founding team has known each other for 25 years. But he said they decided to start a startup after seeing the domestic spending of about 50 million cameras worth $4 billion to $5 billion a year, along with incentives from the Indian government and a drive from customers looking for an alternative to China.
“If we don’t do that, this generation will die out and disappear. Nobody has the experience to do the full cycle,” Kumar said in an interview.
India has earmarked $9 billion to boost domestic development of semiconductor and display manufacturing companies. The Modi government has approved four semiconductor units in the country to produce chips for applications such as automotive, home appliances, EVs, industrial and telecom. The four units will attract an investment of about $17.9 billion and have a cumulative capacity of about 70 million chips per day, according to government estimates.
Four-month-old BigEndian initially plans to partner with Taiwanese manufacturing company UMC for surveillance chips, with a reference chip based on a 28nm node expected to be released in the first quarter of 2025. The startup also plans to expand its footprint over time and look at the overall IoT market, which is primarily driven by 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers.
Unlike traditional Fabless semiconductor companies, BigEndian is building a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model that allows governments to avoid the Chinese middleware approach common in existing surveillance solutions. The model provides a software solution that helps manufacturers and customers customize how surveillance cameras work. This allows the startup to increase revenue by offering these customizations as add-ons on a subscription basis.
“India consumes about a billion of these chipsets a year,” Kumar said. “But these are all chipsets that cost 50 cents to $1… If you go down to the emerging automotive segments, there are a lot of 32-bit controllers going into cars today… But we can’t jump into all these segments on day one because it’s hard to fund them in India.”
To start, BigEndian raised $3 million in an all-equity seed round led by Vertex Ventures SEA and India. While the seed funding may not be enough for the Fabless semiconductor startup to meet its massive orders, Kumar said the incentives offered by the Indian government to the industry are giving BigEndian, which has about 16 employees, a boost and “almost like raising $5 million.”
“The chances of us raising money at this stage are very, very low because we are a country that has not had a huge success in semiconductors. If I were in the US, I could actually raise about $12 million to $15 million, but here we have to follow the constraints, and that is the challenge. That will probably be a barrier to entry for us, and a barrier for other competitors to come in,” he said.
The round also included participation from strategic investors, including Amitabh Nagpal, head of startup business development at Amazon Web Services, which will allow the startup to raise a larger check in the next round.
BigEndian doesn't plan to limit its surveillance chip market, which powers a wide range of low- to mid-priced cameras, to India.
“Our goal is to create bread and butter for you to eat and prove to the market that Indian silicon companies can move up the food chain rather than coming from the top down,” Kumar said.
