Doubling Down on India’s Semiconductor Future: Our Continued Partnership with Morphing Machines
- Sunil Cavale
- Oct 8
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 8
Morphing Machines raises a $4.3M Series A round to accelerate its efforts to build ‘REDEFINE’ a parallel-processing reconfigurable chip for new-age applications.
Fifteen months ago, we partnered with Morphing Machines on a shared conviction: that the future of computing will be shaped by architectures that can adapt as quickly as the world’s data and intelligence evolve. Back then, Morphing Machines was a small, determined team translating two decades of research from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, into a commercial venture. They were attempting something few had from India: to build a new class of semiconductor IP that could power the world’s most demanding workloads.
Now, as the company announces its $4.3M Series A round led by IAN Alpha Fund with participation from existing investors, we are proud to renew our partnership. Our reinvestment is more than financial — it reflects continued conviction in a team and mission that could redefine how compute is designed and deployed.
Our Original Thesis
When we first met the founders, what stood out was not a single product but an ambition to rethink how compute could be made both powerful and flexible.
In our conversations back then, we saw an inherent problem in the rigidity of existing architectures that were not well suited for AI and data-intensive workloads. This created a market opportunity for a new approach that balanced performance, energy efficiency, and adaptability. In a team that combined four decades of architectural depth (Prof. S. K. Nandy and Dr. Ranjani Narayan) with entrepreneurial focus and customer empathy (Deepak Shapeti), we saw the right ingredients to build out such a product.
India’s semiconductor renaissance was just taking shape, with national programs like the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), Design Linked Incentive (DLI), and Chips to Startup (C2S) signalling a long-term commitment to design-led innovation.
From Vision to Validation
Over the past year and a quarter, the Morphing Machines team has grown in strength and depth, attracting engineers and advisors from India and abroad. The team has added seasoned semiconductor professionals formerly at Texas Instruments, Intel, Xilinx, Realtek etc., who are now leading various functions in the organization.
The team’s architectural innovations are now being demonstrated on FPGAs across real-world workloads, a critical step towards customer validation.
Partnerships with ecosystem stakeholders are vital for semiconductor startups. Such partnerships across the design, fabrication, and application ecosystem have strengthened Morphing Machines’ reach and credibility. On the commercial side, early customer conversations in quantitative finance and data-center segments have given validation to the need for the unique architecture that Morphing Machines has developed. These engagements are now well positioned to translate into paid proof-of-concept (PoC) opportunities that will further validate the market need.
Internally, we’ve seen the founders grown from research leaders to institution builders — bringing in structure, accountability, and culture. Their ability to bridge academia, product, and business continues to set them apart.
Why We Reinvested
Since our seed investment, the company has consistently strengthened its engineering foundation, deepening its ecosystem collaborations that have continued to de-risk the technology and brought clarity on market and use cases. What was once a vision is now a credible roadmap.
Their long-term thinking combined with decisive execution continues to reinforce our belief. The past six months have specifically focussed on narrowing down on the specific workloads in data centres that bring out the most from the chip architecture while addressing a major pain point for customers.
The leadership at Morphing Machines has been proactive in travelling to the EU and the US, identifying and establishing key partnerships that enable the IP to get into the hands of the customer sooner.
Compute demand is exploding globally, while efficiency and flexibility have become the new currencies of performance. As AI and data workloads reshape the industry, the need for fresh thinking in architecture design has never been clearer. The global semiconductor community increasingly echoes this need. IMEC’s recent piece on “Flex is key” highlights precisely the kind of innovation Morphing Machines has been building toward for years.
The Road Ahead
The next 18–24 months will be pivotal. The company will move towards its first tape-out and silicon validation, expand pilot engagements across India, the US, and Europe, and build for customer adoption.
It will also deepen its organizational capacity — building leadership layers, expanding customer success functions, and preparing for commercial scaling.
Each of these milestones moves the company from a state of promise to proof — the transition that defines all deeptech journeys.
As India accelerates its semiconductor mission, companies such as Morphing Machines remind us what’s possible when vision meets execution. In a world dominated by global chip giants, this Bengaluru-based team is building something audacious — an architecture that could redefine performance and efficiency for modern computing.
Our journey with Morphing Machines reflects the philosophy we hold dear at Speciale Invest: to back deep-science founders who operate on long horizons, where patient capital meets purposeful innovation.
We take pride in knowing that a part of the transformation of global compute is being engineered right here in Bengaluru.
Read our note on our investment in Morphing Machines’ seed round in 2024
If you’re building something ambitious and exciting in semiconductors and the broader deepscience and deeptech, we’d love to hear from you on info@specialeinvest.com