02 — Why now
The case for building chips from India has never been this strong. Policy, fabs, talent and capital have arrived inside the same eighteen months — a team that forms now catches the whole wave.
India has spent a decade talking about semiconductors. In the last eighteen months it stopped talking and started building. Five things that were promises a year ago are facts today — and they have lined up at the same time.
India’s first 300 mm commercial fab is rising at Dholera, with first silicon targeted for late 2026 and a major lithography partnership signed this year. Behind it, a full assembly-and-test backend has come online inside a single year. A chip designed in India can now be built and packaged in India — something that was simply not true twelve months ago.
A national chip-design grid now supports close to a hundred thousand engineers and students — among the largest centralised design user bases anywhere. Senior semiconductor engineers are returning to India from the US and elsewhere. And Kochi’s Maker Village, India’s largest electronics-hardware incubator, gives a Kerala-based team a real launchpad.
Indian chip-design startups are raising at a pace not seen before — several have closed funding rounds in the last year, including the largest ever for an Indian fabless company. For a new team, the market is no longer a thesis to argue. It is a comparable set to point at.
As global supply chains re-sort, India is being deliberately positioned as a trusted design and manufacturing node. The foundry and equipment partnerships signed through 2026 make that intent explicit — and a team building here now is building inside that tailwind, not against it.
Each of these arrived on its own schedule. They have never all been true at the same moment before — and they will not stay this aligned for long. A founding team that forms now catches every one of them. A team that waits a year is late to all of them.
Register your interest — as a co-founder, or at any level of commitment.
Register your interest