Energy, relatively than compute, is quick turning into the limiting consider scaling AI information facilities. That shift has prompted Peak XV Companions to again C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup constructing plug-and-play, system-level energy options designed to chop vitality losses and enhance the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure.
C2i (which stands for management conversion and intelligence) has raised $15 million in a Sequence A spherical led by Peak XV Companions, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the two-year-old startup’s complete funding to $19 million.
The funding comes as data-center vitality demand accelerates worldwide. Electrical energy consumption from information facilities is projected to just about triple by 2035, per a December 2025 report from BloombergNEF, whereas Goldman Sachs Analysis estimates data-center energy demand might surge 175% by 2030 from 2023 ranges — the equal of including one other top-10 power-consuming nation.
A lot of that pressure comes not from producing electrical energy however from changing it effectively inside information facilities, the place high-voltage energy should be stepped down hundreds of occasions earlier than it reaches GPUs. This course of at the moment wastes about 15% to twenty% of vitality, C2i’s co-founder and CTO Preetam Tadeparthy mentioned in an interview.
“What was 400 volts has already moved to 800 volts, and can doubtless go greater,” Tadeparthy informed TechCrunch.
Based in 2024 by former Texas Devices energy executives Ram Anant, Vikram Gakhar, Preetam Tadeparthy, and Dattatreya Suryanarayana, together with Harsha S. B and Muthusubramanian N. V, C2i is redesigning energy supply as a single, plug-and-play “grid-to-GPU” system spanning the data-center bus to the processor itself.
By treating energy conversion, management and packaging as an built-in platform, C2i estimates it will possibly minimize end-to-end losses by round 10% — roughly 100 kilowatts saved for each megawatt consumed — with knock-on results for cooling prices, GPU utilisation and general data-center economics.
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“All that interprets on to complete value of possession, income, and profitability,” Tadeparthy mentioned.
For Peak XV Companions (which break up from Sequoia Capital in 2023), the attraction lies in how energy prices form the economics of AI infrastructure at scale. Rajan Anandan, the enterprise agency’s managing director, informed TechCrunch that after the upfront capital funding in servers and services, vitality prices change into the dominant ongoing expense for information facilities, making even incremental effectivity features extremely useful.
“When you can cut back vitality prices by, name it, 10 to 30%, that’s like an enormous quantity,” Anandan mentioned. “You’re speaking about tens of billions of {dollars}.”
The claims will probably be examined rapidly. C2i expects its first two silicon designs to return from fabrication between April and June, after which the startup plans to validate efficiency with data-center operators and hyperscalers which have requested to assessment the info, in keeping with Tadeparthy.
The Bengaluru-based startup has constructed a staff of about 65 engineers and is organising customer-facing operations within the U.S. and Taiwan because it prepares for early deployments.
Energy supply is among the most entrenched components of the data-center stack, lengthy dominated by giant incumbents with deep stability sheets and years-long qualification cycles. Whereas many more recent firms concentrate on bettering particular person elements, redesigning energy supply end-to-end requires coordinating silicon, packaging, and system structure concurrently — a capital-intensive method that few startups try and one that may take years to show in manufacturing environments.
Anandan mentioned the actual query now’s execution, noting that each one startups face expertise, market, and staff dangers when betting on how industries evolve. In C2i’s case, he mentioned, the suggestions loop needs to be comparatively quick. “We’ll know within the subsequent six months,” mentioned Anandan, pointing to approaching silicon and early buyer validation because the second when the thesis will probably be examined.
The guess additionally displays how India’s semiconductor design ecosystem has matured in recent times.
“The way in which you need to have a look at semiconductors in India is, that is like 2008 e-commerce,” mentioned Anandan. “It’s simply getting began.”
He pointed to the depth of engineering expertise — with a rising share of worldwide chip designers based mostly within the nation — alongside government-backed design-linked incentives which have lowered the fee and danger of tape-outs, making it more and more viable for startups to construct globally aggressive semiconductor merchandise from India relatively than function solely as captive design facilities.
Whether or not these situations translate right into a globally aggressive product will change into clearer over the approaching months, as C2i begins validating its system-level energy options with clients.