Quick Take
- SiMa.ai raised $150 Mn in Series C at a $1.45 Bn valuation.
- The raise takes its total funding to $500 Mn since 2018.
- SiMa.ai runs a 90-person India team and counts L&T Technology Services as a client.
Physical AI chip startup SiMa.ai has raised $150 Mn in a Series C round. The round values the company at $1.45 Bn. It employs about 90 people in India.
The round was co-led by Fidelity Management and Research Company and Amplify. Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Maverick Capital, Point72 and StepStone Group also took part.
AllianceBernstein, Baron Capital, J.P. Morgan and the State of Michigan came in as new investors. SiMa.ai said the Series C was oversubscribed.
The raise takes SiMa.ai’s total funding to $500 Mn since it was founded in 2018. Its last big round was an $80 Mn Series B in 2021. Fidelity led that round too.
Who founded SiMa.ai?
SiMa.ai was founded by Krishna Rangasayee. He was chief operating officer at chipmaker Groq before this. Earlier he spent 18 years at Xilinx, a chip firm now owned by AMD.
Rangasayee is of Indian origin. SiMa.ai runs a large engineering base in India. That base is central to how the company builds its chips.
What is the India connection?
The India link is not small. SiMa.ai has about 90 staff in the country. Its clients include L&T Technology Services, the engineering arm of Larsen and Toubro.
Bosch, Micron, Synopsys and AVerMedia are also on the SiMa.ai customer list. Several of these firms run large India operations.
Why does an American chip firm matter to Indian founders? Because SiMa.ai targets the same edge-device market that Indian robotics and drone startups chase.
What is physical AI?
SiMa.ai makes chips that run AI on the device itself. There is no need to send data to the cloud and wait. That approach is called physical AI.
Physical AI puts machine learning inside robots, drones, cameras and cars. SiMa.ai sells a full-stack platform of purpose-built silicon plus software. The pitch is lower power and lower cost than Nvidia’s GPUs.
Where will the money go?
SiMa.ai will spend the new money on two things. First, it will scale Palette Neat, its software tool for building physical AI apps. Second, it will fund its next chip generation.
SiMa.ai says the new chip will hit 1,000 dense TOPS while drawing under 80 watts. TOPS means trillions of operations per second. It is a common measure of AI chip speed.
The current Gen 2 platform reaches 50 TOPS. The new hardware is due in the first half of 2028. That is a twenty-fold jump in raw speed.
Revenue is climbing fast. SiMa.ai said its revenue quadrupled between 2024 and 2025. Growth has continued through 2026.
SiMa.ai did not give a rupee or dollar revenue figure. That gap makes the numbers hard to check.
The market SiMa.ai is chasing is large. Physical AI devices will reach 145 million units by 2035, according to Counterpoint Research. Rangasayee calls it a $50 trillion market across humanoids, cars and drones.
What this means for you: Indian deep-tech founders now have a well-funded edge-AI supplier with staff and clients in India. It also sets a fresh benchmark for what a chip startup can raise.
StartupFeed Insight
The number that matters here is not $150 Mn. It is 90, the size of SiMa.ai’s India team, and one client name: L&T Technology Services. A US-headquartered chip firm has quietly built real engineering weight in India while national coverage files it under “American startup”. The missing revenue figure is the weak spot. Quadrupled growth means little without a base number. Watch for SiMa.ai’s Gen 3 chip to ship on time in the first half of 2028. If it slips, the 1,000 TOPS claim becomes the story instead of the funding.
— Avinash Mishra, Business Correspondent
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