India Wants To Build Chips. This Company Wants To Make Sure They Work

India’s semiconductor ambitions are moving beyond building fabrication and packaging capacity. After all, there’s money behind it. Tracxn estimates that the sector has raised $1.4 billion in equity funding to date, with $701 million, or half of the total, raised since 2025.

As more companies and institutions begin developing chips domestically, the country is also building the infrastructure needed to design, verify, validate, and eventually manufacture them.

Manufacturing a chip costs millions of dollars, which makes proving that a complex chip is doing exactly what it was designed to do critical before sending it for fabrication.

That is the problem US-based VerifAIX wants to address in India. 

VerifAIX is an AI-native semiconductor verification company, founded by Madhulima Tewari, Kenneth Roe, and Avner Landver, whose backgrounds span AI, semiconductor design, formal verification, and electronic design automation (EDA). 

Its platform is built around what the company calls a “Formal Brain”, which creates a mathematical representation of a chip’s intended behaviour and reasons across specifications, RTL, and verification assets.

The company has just raised $5 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Endiya Partners and Bluehill VC. It plans to channel the funds to fuel product development, customer deployments, and engineering expansion across the US, India, and Israel.

It will also expand the Formal Brain, automate abstraction and decomposition, strengthen formal and simulation capabilities, and support customer deployments.

A Trust Layer for Chip Design

Rather than simply using an LLM to generate verification code, VerifAIX wants to use its foundation across verification planning, formal analysis, simulation, coverage, debugging and verification closure.

“AI is changing how semiconductor designs are created, but generating a design is not the same as proving that it is correct,” CEO Tewari tells AIM.

VerifAIX does not position itself as a replacement for established EDA vendors such as Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens. Instead, it uses their tools as part of its workflow and to automate manual, complex verification tasks.

The distinction matters because a software bug can often be fixed through an update. A silicon bug, however, can require another manufacturing run after a chip has already been fabricated.

Tewari explains that verification can account for more than half of the time spent on chip development, making late-stage errors particularly expensive. The company is looking to use AI to reduce verification timelines while increasing confidence that corner cases have been covered.

VerifAIX is already deploying its platform with semiconductor companies on real-world verification challenges, including control-intensive and protocol-heavy designs. Its target customers include semiconductor and IP companies, processor and AI accelerator developers, hyperscalers, and systems companies.

In the Indian ecosystem, this shift is already visible in the government’s chip-design infrastructure. The ChipIN Centre at C-DAC Bengaluru provides access to EDA tools, prototyping facilities, and foundry access, while also supporting design validation, integration, and characterisation. 

The government has also identified service providers for post-silicon validation under its Design Linked Incentive programme. 

In February, C-DAC Bengaluru opened PRITVI-ACE, a pre-silicon validation facility designed to test designs before fabrication. It supports validation from individual IP blocks to complete system-level designs, including firmware, drivers, protocol compliance, and performance testing. C-DAC Noida also provides formal and functional verification services for IP, subsystems, and SoCs before silicon fabrication.

Why Indian Semiconductors Matter

India is already a major semiconductor design centre. The government said in March that India hosts about 7% of the world’s semiconductor global capability centres (GCCs) and employs nearly 20% of the global semiconductor chip-design workforce. 

Tracxn’s data reinforces the ecosystem's concentration in Bengaluru. The city is home to 626 of India’s 3,557 semiconductor companies and accounts for 40.1% of the sector’s equity funding, making it the country’s largest semiconductor hub by both company count and funding share.

For VerifAIX, that makes Bengaluru less a sales outpost and more an engineering base.

“Bengaluru is the obvious choice for us,” Tewari says, adding that the company had found a strong concentration of semiconductor design and verification talent in the city.

The company plans to build a larger engineering operation in India over the next six to 12 months, with a focus on AI research, formal verification, and semiconductor engineering. Its India team already includes senior talent with experience at Intel and other EDA companies.

Tewari believes that India has a deep pool of engineers with experience in RTL design, functional verification, formal verification, processors, and SoC development. VerifAIX plans to use that expertise to build its verification tools and software in India.

The company is also looking beyond India’s best-known engineering institutes. It has a partnership with IIT Kharagpur and plans to recruit from IIITs, BITS, and state universities. Tewari says the company wants to hire engineers with strong fundamentals and train them in AI, reflecting the overlap it needs between semiconductor engineering and AI.

While Bengaluru will remain its main base, VerifAIX is also exploring talent in Delhi-NCR and could eventually build a remote team there.

What About Ownership?

Tewari argues that as Indian companies take ownership of more of the semiconductor development chain, verification will become a more important responsibility. She wants India to become a GCC hub for engineering, sales, and marketing.

Historically, Indian GCC teams have often worked on parts of globally-led chip programmes, with final ownership and sign-off sitting elsewhere.

“If we want to change the game, we want to be the owners of the fab,” Tewari says, referring to India’s broader ambition to own more of the semiconductor value chain. She argues that greater ownership would also bring greater accountability for verification and sign-off.

The opportunity sits at the intersection of two trends: more chips being designed in India and a growing responsibility for ensuring those designs are exact. As India tries to move further up the semiconductor value chain, verification could become as important as designing or manufacturing the chip itself.