India Tech Report

In today’s episode, Ramamurthy Sivakumar, co-founder and CEO at HrdWyr, a semiconductor design startup in Bengaluru, talks about the company’s plans after recently raising $13 million in Series A funding, in an investment led by Ideaspring Capital.
The company was co-founded in 2023 by Siva and Ganesh Guruswamy, both industry veterans spanning companies including Intel, AMD, Sandisk and Motorola.
In this conversation, Siva talks about how the era of custom silicon is upon us and what the AI-led opportunity represents. The company specialises in System-on-Chip (AISoC) designs tailored for edge computing and applications like electric vehicles and industrial equipment.
HrdWyr’s first product, named Indus 1011, is expected to hit the market by the end of this year, Siva says. In August last year, the company had announced it had picked Tata Electronics as the packaging partner and also that Indian consumer electronics company boAt would be an anchor customer for the chip — a small, but historic milestone for India's semiconductor aspirations.
boAt is to use this chip, which offers power management as a core feature, in its truly wireless earbuds charging case.
As many of you know, startups such as HrdWyr are getting funded in the time of a broader national push in India for semiconductor self-reliance, supported by significant government investment. Siva notes, however, that significant challenges remain, such as the lack of timely and adequate funding at critical stages.
Still, he thinks that the only way forward is to look at the aggregate of all the ongoing efforts — from startups such as HrdWyr to conglomerates like Tata setting up foundries and OSATs — as an opportunity to tap a trillion-dollar sector, and, as a nation building mission. #Conversations

Chapters

(00:00) The shift toward custom silicon and new high-volume markets

(03:37) The genesis of HrdWyr and identifying a generational shift in AI

(09:02) From bits to atoms: transitioning from cyber AI to physical AI

(12:54) Designing AI-first architectures for the intelligent edge

(21:45) Executing the product roadmap with strategic anchor customers

(30:23) Building a world-class semiconductor engineering team in India

(35:21) India’s strategic role in the global $1 trillion semiconductor market

(43:46) The 15-year vision for maturing the Indian deep-tech ecosystem

In August last year, a little known semiconductor startup (at the time) founded by two industry veterans from India, announced a small, but historic milestone. Not just for themselves, but the country. The startup, HrdWyr Ventures, now more popularly, just HrdWyr, had struck two partnerships, one with Tata Electronics for the packaging of its first chip, and the other with boAt, the consumer electronics company, as an anchor customer for the new processor.
boAt would use their chip, named Indus 1011, in its truly wireless stereo earbuds charging cases, the companies had announced. Earlier this month, HrdWyr announced the successful close of its Series A funding round, raising $13 million in an investment led by the well known Bengaluru deep tech VC firm Ideaspring Capital.
Last week, I got a chance to sit down with Ramamurthy Sivakumar, co-founder and CEO of HrdWyr to get a sense of what next for him, Ganesh Guruswamy, and their team of 18 engineers. Catch the full interview right here tomorrow, 6 a.m. IST. Here's a quick preview, in which Siva talks about the practical decisions semiconductor entrepreneurs have to make, especially when they decide to go build in a nascent ecosystem such as the one in India. #Shorts #Preview

HrdWyr, a Bengaluru-based semiconductor startup, recently secured $13 million in Series A funding led by Ideaspring Capital to advance its AI-native chip technology. The company specializes in System-on-Chip (AISoC) designs tailored for edge computing and real-world applications like electric vehicles and industrial equipment.

A significant milestone for the firm is its partnership with boAt and Tata Electronics to produce the Indus 1011, a locally designed chip for audio wearables. 

Companies such as HrdWyr are getting funded in the time of a broader national push for semiconductor self-reliance, supported by significant government investment and rising market demand.

Yesterday, I spoke to Co-founder and CEO Ramamurthy Sivakumar, an Intel Corp veteran, on HrdWyr’s plans. Catch the full interview right here on Tuesday, June 16th. Here’s a 90 second preview, with Siva talking about the massive influence of AI. #Shorts #Preview

In today’s episode, I bring you Part 2 of an interview with Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO, at Ideaspring Capital in Bengaluru.

In this episode, we pick up the conversation with a brief discussion on what the two VC investors are seeing when it comes to the growth of translational research in India — and I want to add that this was in the broader sense of any movement from scientific lab to commercial product, and not just in the medical field, where the term originated.

And if you stick around you’ll hear Naganand and Suri discuss their views on how early-stage investing in deep tech is changing, can such investors make meaningful investments in highly capital intensive sectors such as robotics, nuclear fusion and quantum computing hardware, in India, getting something not quite right but moving on, and whether AI is changing their work as well, and in what ways.

And as promised in Part 1, we take a quick look at what might represent a ‘Flipkart moment’ in India’s deep tech sector, and the evolution of Ideaspring itself from Fund 1 to Fund 4.

Catch Part 1 here:
https://indiatechreport.transistor.fm/episodes/deep-tech-ideaspring-capitals-founders-on-investing-with-conviction-eyes-wide-open-part-1

Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO at Ideaspring Capital, a well known deep tech VC firm in Bengaluru, sat down with me recently for an interview, which I'm publishing in two parts.
Catch Part 2, the concluding part, tomorrow, in which they talk about the raise-invest-grow-exit imperative of venture investing, and what that means for investing in deep tech startups in India.
What's happening in India's top science and engineering schools when it comes to the lab-to-market journey? How is AI changing VC in deep tech and the 'Flipkart moment' of deep tech in India.

Catch Part 1 here:
https://indiatechreport.transistor.fm/episodes/deep-tech-ideaspring-capitals-founders-on-investing-with-conviction-eyes-wide-open-part-1

In today’s episode, on the occasion of World Environment Day, I bring you a conversation with Devdut Dalal (Dev), Xavier Laguarta Soler (Xavi) and Nathan Torbick (Nate), founders of Mitti Labs.

Rice is a nutritional staple for nearly half the human population. Its cultivation is also a formidable contributor to global warming, accounting for 10-12 percent of all methane emissions from human activity. And Methane is 80-86 times more potent than CO2 in warming the planet over a 20-year timeframe, and about 28 times over a century.

Growing rice also takes up 40 percent of the world’s freshwater resources. By drowning their fields to suppress weeds, farmers have inadvertently cultivated methanogenic microbes that release this ‘super pollutant.’ At Mitti Labs, Harvard Business School alumni Dev and Xavi have teamed up with Nate, a distinguished scientist who’s worked NASA and JaXA, to build a “full-stack” remedy.

They started work in India first some three years ago, persuading farmers to try out a technique known as Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) that entails periodically drain their fields, interrupting the anaerobic feast of methane-producing bacteria.

This is a known practice developed at the International Rice Research Institute. What the entrepreneurs at Mitti Labs are doing, however, is to plug in an innovative digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) platform. Using tools including satellite data and digital twins of the farms they aim to convert the methane reductions from AWD to equivalent carbon credits.

The plan at this venture, which is backed by the VC investor Lightspeed, is to become a vertically integrated carbon project developer providing farmers with free tools and a share of the revenue from the sale of the carbon credits.

Dev, Xavi and Nate, and their 100-plus team are already working with some 70,000 farmers in India, through partnerships with various NGOs and other such grassroots organisations that work closely with the farmers.

Their long-term success hinges on mobilising a substantial share of some 150 million smallholder rice growers who have farmed the same way for generations.

Chapters
(00:00) Introduction to Mitti Labs and the mission to bridge finance and farming

(01:18) Why rice is a formidable contributor to global warming

(03:19) Meeting the founders: the synthesis of supply and demand expertise

(05:31) The rice problem: water scarcity and the methane super pollutant

(08:52) The origin story: from skepticism to building a company at Harvard

(11:27) Developing a full-stack solution: finance, operations, and science

(13:55) Pulling the levers of change: tackling underexploited sources of emissions

(16:38) Convincing 150 million smallholder farmers to change generations of habits

(18:55) Operating as a vertically integrated carbon project developer

(21:21) Reaching 70,000 farmers with free tools and advisory services

(23:49) The science of satellite remote sensing and SAR technology

(29:37) Closing the loop: from on-the-ground practice to issued carbon credits

(31:17) Leveraging data as a goldmine for insights in smallholder agriculture

(33:43) Beyond the code: why the real product is environmental and social impact

(35:09) The business model: converting methane reductions into carbon tokens

(37:58) A history of rice farming and the invention of alternate wetting and drying (AWD)

(41:01) The agronomic benefits of AWD: hardier crops and pest reduction

(45:22) Quantifying water savings and methane reduction for the average farmer

(48:44) The day-to-day of village level mobilization and farmer onboarding

(53:02) Deep dive into dMRV: digital measurement, reporting, and verification

(56:50) The future of digital literacy and the potential for a farmer-facing app

(01:01:23) Identifying macro opportunities and the challenge of environmental resilience

(01:04:46) Navigating the voluntary carbon market and ensuring credit quality

(01:06:40) Scaling the thesis: geographic expansion and diversifying the buyer set

(01:10:14) The five-year vision: high-quality data and responsible corporate partnership

Rice is one of our biggest staples, here in India, but the way our farmers grow it is becoming increasingly unsustainable, as it contributes to depleting our water tables to dangerous levels.
Rice cultivation is also responsible for 10-12 percent of all methane released into the atmosphere from human activity — a gas that is 80-86 times more potent than CO2 in warming the planet over a 20-year period.
Devdut Dalal, Xavier Laguarta Soler and Nathan Torbick, founders of Mitti Labs, have a plan to change this, at scale. And they're already persuading some 70,000 rice farmers in India to try out their science-backed methods. In the process, they also want to translate the reduced methane emissions to equivalent carbon credits, so that the farmers benefit from the sale of those credits.
Catch the full conversation on Friday, June 5, World Environment Day, right here or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's a quick preview, with Nate giving us a sense of the potential for methane reduction and the water savings.

Today is the first day of the second year of this podcast. And in today’s episode of Conversations, I’m really happy to bring you part 1 of an interview with Naganand Doreswamy, partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO, at Ideaspring Capital.
They are among those few VC investors in India who were backing deep tech startups long before the government’s massive research and development and innovation fund prompted everyone to want to grab a share of the pie.
This was a rich conversation for me to record, with plenty of plain speak without jargon that’s characteristic of these two VCs. We jumped right in, with Ideaspring’s latest investment, the $13 million Series A round that they led at the semiconductor company HrdWyr, how that reflects their views on deep tech investing today in India, what the RDIF has done and challenges that remain.
I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I did recording it.
Catch the second half of this conversation on Tuesday next week, where we talk about what might represent the Flipkart moment of India’s deep tech sector, and Ideaspring’s next fund.

One could think of ‘Mitti’ — the Hindi word for soil — as representing the grounded foundation of a cooler future. And for us in India while rice that grows in our soil is a daily staple, its traditional cultivation is a hidden climate hazard. Rice cultivation worldwide is responsible for 10-12 percent of human-caused methane emissions. It also consumes staggering amounts of water.
Coming up next on Conversations at India Tech Report, Devdut Dalal, Xavier Laguarta Soler, and Nathan Torbick, co-founders of Mitti Labs talk about how they are turning rice farming into a powerful vehicle for climate action – specifically targeting methane emissions from rice fields.
Since launching in late 2023, this “full stack” climate-tech startup has scaled from an idea that Harvard alumni Dev and Xavi had to a VC-funded startup (investors include Lightspeed) touching some 70,000 small-holder farmers in India today. Mitti Labs is helping the farmers change how they water their rice crops in a manner that reduces methane emissions, cuts water use and even makes the crops hardier, the entrepreneurs say.
Nate, a distinguished scientist, adds the science and tech experience, helping Mitti Labs tap satellite remote sensing and data analytics to build a digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) system, to track methane reductions at the field level. By converting these environmental wins into high-quality carbon credits, Mitti Labs aims to provide direct financial incentives and free advisory services to the farmers.
Catch the episode on June 5, World Environment Day, right here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a preview with Xavi and Dev laying out their basic thesis.
#deeptech #startup #climatechange 

Mitti Labs
https://www.mittilabs.earth/about

Lightspeed's investment
https://lsvp.com/stories/lightspeeds-investment-in-mitti-labs/

Welcome to this bonus episode in which I’m following up with a quick interview with Ravi Kulkarni, founder and COO of Moonrider, an electric tractor venture in Bengaluru. In the previous episode, I brought you a detailed sit-down conversation with Anoop Srikantaswamy, Ravi’s fellow founder and CEO.

Ravi is also a mechanical engineer by training, with a career spanning auto industry giants such as Tata Motors and Volvo. In this conversation, Ravi reflected on his innate drive to listen to the environment and solve real-world problems.

Before joining forces with Anoop, Ravi co-founded an electric three-wheeler venture, and he brings that vital execution experience to Moonrider’s mission to build tractors for the world.

In this episode, Ravi gives us a simple description of how Moonrider's proprietary refrigerated battery packs work, maintaining cell temperatures low enough to ensure that high-torque electric tractors can handle the harshest field conditions while aiming for price parity with diesel.

He also touches upon topics such as selling tractors to small-holder farmers in India on the one hand to the potential for global collaborations on the other, and the critical importance of finding the right partner if an entrepreneur wants to go from idea to successful business.