India’s homegrown semiconductor industry is attracting increasingly larger investments amid fewer deals, signalling a maturing market with enhanced government support and expanding technological domains.
A new report by venture capital firm Speciale Invest and the Startup Policy Forum suggests India’s homegrown semiconductor sector is attracting more capital even as the number of deals thins out. The study, titled “Indian Semiconductor Startup Landscape 2026”, says chip startups have raised about $206 million across 51 funding rounds since 2022, with $61.9 million raised in the first half of 2026 alone.
That half-year figure amounts to 81% of the $76.6 million raised during all of 2025, according to the report. Yet the pace of deal-making has eased, with funding rounds falling from 16 in 2024 to 13 in 2025 and seven in the first half of 2026. The data points to a market in which investors are backing fewer companies but writing larger cheques for businesses that are further along in development and commercialisation.
The report also links the sector’s progress to government support. Of 24 chip-design projects backed under the Design-Linked Incentive scheme, 14 later secured institutional venture capital, drawing $100.8 million across their first and second rounds. Six of those companies went on to close follow-on rounds worth a combined $53.6 million, while C2i Semiconductors, NetraSemi, Morphing Machines and Mindgrove Technologies together account for about 56% of the private capital raised by DLI-backed firms.
Speciale Invest and the Startup Policy Forum said the speed of fundraising is another sign of maturing. Several startups have moved from seed to Series A in as little as seven to 22 months, and seven recent Series A rounds totalled $73.7 million, or roughly one-third of all semiconductor startup capital raised in India since 2022. Strategic investors are becoming more visible too, with companies such as Zoho and TDK Ventures backing rounds and bringing more than money, including access to fabs, tool credits, reference customers and design partnerships.
The report says the sector is also broadening beyond its first wave of digital, RISC-V and edge system-on-chip companies. New entrants are appearing in photonics, power and compound semiconductors, fab tooling and metrology, AI data-centre silicon, AI-assisted chip-design workflows and analogue AI inference, suggesting a deeper pipeline for India’s semiconductor ambitions.
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