Sensesemi Raises ₹25 Crore to Tape Out Edge AI Wearable Chip

Sensesemi Raises ₹25 Crore to Bring Low-Power Wearable Chips to Market

Sensesemi Technologies, a Bengaluru-based fabless semiconductor startup founded in 2022, has raised ₹25 crore (approximately $2.7 million) in a seed funding round led by Piper Serica, a technology-focused investment firm. The capital will fund the tapeout and validation of Sensesemi's first two test chips in 2026, along with expansion of its core engineering team. Sensesemi is a DLI-approved startup supported under the India Semiconductor Mission's Design Linked Incentive scheme, making it eligible for up to 50 percent coverage of eligible development expenses alongside the Piper Serica investment.

What Sensesemi Builds

Sensesemi develops ultra-low-power system-on-chip designs for wearable health monitoring devices and medical IoT applications, focusing on the fundamental engineering challenge of extending battery life without sacrificing sensing accuracy or connectivity performance. Target applications include smartwatches and fitness trackers, continuous health monitoring patches, medical-grade wearables for remote patient monitoring, and industrial IoT sensor nodes. The company's chip architectures prioritise sub-milliwatt active power consumption and aggressive duty cycling to enable always-on biometric sensing on coin cell or thin-film battery power sources.

The Wearable Battery Life Problem

Despite years of iteration, most smartwatches and health wearables still deliver only one to five days of battery life in continuous monitoring mode, a limitation driven by the power consumption of standard CMOS sensor interfaces, wireless radios, and application processors. Sensesemi's approach targets the sensor data acquisition and pre-processing stages as the primary power reduction opportunity, using event-driven and analog-digital hybrid architectures that reduce unnecessary digital switching activity compared to conventional SoC designs.

India's Health Wearable Opportunity

India represents one of the world's largest and fastest-growing wearable device markets, driven by a combination of rising health awareness, expanding smartphone penetration, and growing telemedicine and remote health monitoring adoption accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Indian wearable device manufacturers currently source chips entirely from global fabless companies or Chinese chipmakers, and a domestic SoC supplier like Sensesemi could offer Indian OEMs faster product customisation cycles, lower minimum order quantities, and reduced exposure to import duty on finished chips.

DLI Scheme Support and Tapeout Plans

Sensesemi's participation in the DLI scheme provides access to EDA tool subsidies and government-supported foundry access, which are particularly valuable for early-stage fabless companies where tapeout costs at even mature technology nodes can represent a significant fraction of total funding. The two planned 2026 tapeouts will validate core circuit blocks and demonstrate the company's power efficiency claims with measured silicon data, a critical step for attracting deeper venture funding and initial customer engagements in the wearable OEM market.

A Signal for India's Fabless Ecosystem

Sensesemi's raise contributes to a growing body of evidence that India's fabless semiconductor startup ecosystem is transitioning from a design services and contract engineering model to a product IP and chip ownership model, a shift that policymakers, investors and industry organisations have been pushing for as a prerequisite for India to build sustainable chip companies with global reach and long-term valuation potential.