Vitality, in desire to compute, is rapid turning into the limiting component in scaling AI recordsdata companies and products. That shift has triggered Peak XV Companions to motivate C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup building dash-and-play, device-stage vitality alternatives designed to reduce energy losses and strengthen the economics of noteworthy-scale AI infrastructure.
C2i (which stands for withhold a watch on conversion and intelligence) has raised $15 million in a Sequence A round led by Peak XV Companions, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the 2-year-dilapidated startup’s complete funding to $19 million.
The funding comes as recordsdata-center energy seek recordsdata from hastens worldwide. Electricity consumption from recordsdata companies and products is projected to merely about triple by 2035, per a December 2025 document from BloombergNEF, while Goldman Sachs Be taught estimates recordsdata-center vitality seek recordsdata from would possibly maybe well surge 175% by 2030 from 2023 ranges — the identical of alongside side one more prime-10 vitality-drinking country.
Noteworthy of that stress comes no longer from producing electrical energy however from converting it effectively inner recordsdata companies and products, where excessive-voltage vitality wants to be stepped down thousands of cases sooner than it reaches GPUs. This route of on the second wastes about 15% to twenty% of energy, C2i’s co-founder and CTO Preetam Tadeparthy acknowledged in an interview.
“What oldschool to be 400 volts has already moved to 800 volts, and would possibly maybe well fair likely wander increased,” Tadeparthy told TechCrunch.
Primarily based in 2024 by worn Texas Instruments vitality executives Ram Anant, Vikram Gakhar, Preetam Tadeparthy, and Dattatreya Suryanarayana, alongside with Harsha S. B and Muthusubramanian N. V, C2i is redesigning vitality shipping as a single, dash-and-play “grid-to-GPU” device spanning the knowledge-center bus to the processor itself.
By treating vitality conversion, withhold a watch on and packaging as an integrated platform, C2i estimates it would possibly maybe maybe well reduce terminate-to-terminate losses by around 10% — roughly 100 kilowatts saved for every megawatt consumed — with knock-on effects for cooling fees, GPU utilisation and overall recordsdata-center economics.
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“All that translates directly to complete cost of ownership, earnings, and profitability,” Tadeparthy acknowledged.
For Peak XV Companions (which spoil up from Sequoia Capital in 2023), the attraction lies in how vitality fees form the economics of AI infrastructure at scale. Rajan Anandan, the enterprise firm’s managing director, told TechCrunch that after the upfront capital funding in servers and companies and products, energy fees change into the dominant ongoing expense for recordsdata companies and products, making even incremental efficiency positive aspects extremely precious.
“In case you would possibly maybe well well decrease energy fees by, call it, 10 to 30%, that’s like a large number,” Anandan acknowledged. “You’re speaking about tens of billions of bucks.”
The claims would possibly maybe be tested immediate. C2i expects its first two silicon designs to come motivate from fabrication between April and June, after which the startup plans to validate efficiency with recordsdata-center operators and hyperscalers which have requested to study the knowledge, in line with Tadeparthy.
The Bengaluru-basically based startup has built a crew of about 65 engineers and is setting up buyer-facing operations in the U.S. and Taiwan as it prepares for early deployments.
Vitality shipping is one of basically the most entrenched formula of the knowledge-center stack, long dominated by noteworthy incumbents with deep balance sheets and years-long qualification cycles. Whereas many more moderen firms point of interest on making improvements to particular person formula, redesigning vitality shipping terminate-to-terminate requires coordinating silicon, packaging, and device structure simultaneously — a capital-intensive come that few startups strive and one that would possibly maybe well elevate years to point to in production environments.
Anandan acknowledged the particular effect a query to now is execution, noting that every person startups face technology, market, and crew dangers when making a wager on how industries evolve. In C2i’s case, he acknowledged, the feedback loop wants to be rather short. “We’ll know in the next six months,” acknowledged Anandan, pointing to imminent silicon and early buyer validation as the second when the thesis would possibly maybe be tested.
The wager moreover shows how India’s semiconductor compose ecosystem has matured lately.
“The come that you just have to always calm behold at semiconductors in India is, right here is like 2008 e-commerce,” acknowledged Anandan. “It’s appropriate getting started.”
He pointed to the depth of engineering skills — with a growing share of international chip designers basically based in the country — alongside govt-backed compose-linked incentives which have reduced the cost and threat of tape-outs, making it extra and extra viable for startups to present globally competitive semiconductor merchandise from India in desire to feature most attention-grabbing as captive compose companies and products.
Whether those prerequisites translate into a globally competitive product will change into clearer over the arrival months, as C2i begins validating its device-stage vitality alternatives with customers.
