Bengaluru, India – A surge in demand for artificial intelligence is driving up power consumption in data centers worldwide, prompting venture capital firm Peak XV Partners to invest $15 million in C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup focused on improving power delivery efficiency. The investment, announced Monday, brings C2i’s total funding to $19 million, according to a press release from Entrackr.
C2i, founded in June 2024 by a team of former Texas Instruments power executives – Ram Anant, Vikram Gakhar, Preetam Tadeparthy, Dattatreya Suryanarayana, Harsha S. B, and Muthusubramanian N. V – is developing “grid-to-GPU” power solutions designed to minimize energy loss within data centers. The company aims to address a critical bottleneck in scaling AI infrastructure: the inefficient conversion of high-voltage power to the lower voltages required by GPUs.
According to C2i co-founder and CTO Preetam Tadeparthy, current power conversion processes waste approximately 15% to 20% of energy. “What used to be 400 volts has already moved to 800 volts, and will likely go higher,” Tadeparthy told TechCrunch. C2i’s system-level approach seeks to recover 8-10% efficiency, potentially improving GPU performance by around 3% and extending server lifetimes, the company claims.
The Series A funding round was led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures. Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV Partners, emphasized the growing importance of energy costs in the economics of AI data centers. “If you can reduce energy costs by, call it, 10 to 30%, that’s like a huge number,” Anandan said to TechCrunch. “You’re talking about tens of billions of dollars.”
The investment comes as projections for data center energy demand continue to climb. A December 2025 report from BloombergNEF projects electricity consumption from data centers will nearly triple by 2035. Goldman Sachs Research estimates data-center power demand could surge 175% by 2030 compared to 2023 levels – equivalent to the energy consumption of an entire top-10 power-consuming country.
C2i plans to use the recent funding to support global expansion, including establishing a U.S. Office to better serve customers and a future applications and systems engineering team in Taiwan. The Bengaluru-based startup, currently employing around 65 engineers, expects its first two silicon designs to be available for validation by data center operators and hyperscalers between April and June. One chip will be manufactured at Tower Semiconductor in Israel, even as the other will be fabricated at GlobalFoundries, either in Singapore or Dallas.
Anandan noted that the success of C2i will depend on execution, citing technology, market, and team risks inherent in any startup. He anticipates a relatively quick validation period. “We’ll know in the next six months,” he said, pointing to the upcoming silicon and early customer validation as key milestones.
The investment in C2i also highlights the growing maturity of India’s semiconductor design ecosystem. Anandan likened the current state of the Indian semiconductor industry to the e-commerce boom of 2008, citing a growing pool of engineering talent and government incentives designed to encourage domestic chip design and manufacturing.