As the AI ​​data center hits its stride, the Peak XV helps the Indian startup C2i improve the bottle.

Power, rather than computation, is fast becoming the limiting factor in the development of AI data. This change has led to the return of Peak XV Partners C2i SemiconductorsIndia’s premier plug-and-play, energy-efficient solutions designed to reduce energy losses and improve the economy of large AI systems.

C2i (which stands for governance and intelligence) has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners, with the participation of Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the total funding for the two-year period to $19 million.

The investment comes as demand for data-center power continues to increase globally. Electricity consumption from the data center is expected to triple by 2035in a December 2025 report from BloombergNEF, where Goldman Sachs Research estimates the demand for energy among data. could rise 175% by 2030 from 2023 levels – the equivalent of adding another 10 energy consuming countries.

Most of these challenges do not come from power generation but from changing it properly inside the data center, where the high voltage must be discharged many times before it reaches the GPUs. This consumes about 15% to 20% of energy, C2i co-founder and CTO Preetam Tadeparty said in an interview.

“What used to be 400 volts has already moved to 800 volts, and it will probably go even higher,” Tadeparty told TechCrunch.

Founded in 2024 by former Texas Instruments electronics executives Ram Anant, Vikram Gakhar, Preetam Tadeparty, and Dattatreya Suryanarayana, along with Harsha S. B and Muthususubramanian N. V, C2i also plans to ship electronics as a single, plug-and-play “grid-to-the-GPU-center processor”

By taking energy conversion, control and packaging as an integrated platform, C2i estimates that it can cut final losses by 10% – about 100 kilowatts saved for every megawatt used – with knock-on effects on cooling costs, GPU usage and overall data center economy.

“All of which translates directly to total cost of ownership, revenue, and profit,” Tadeparty said.

For Peak XV Partners (who a spin-off from Sequoia Capital in 2023), the attraction lies in how the price of electricity changes the economy of AI on a large scale. Rajan Anandan, the company’s managing director, told TechCrunch that after the sale of servers and equipment, electricity costs are the biggest expense of data centers, which makes increased profits more important.

“If you can reduce energy costs, say, 10 to 30%, that’s like a big number,” Anandan said. “You’re talking about billions of dollars.”

The claim will be investigated as soon as possible. C2i hopes that its first two silicon designs will return from production between April and June, after which the startup plans to confirm the work with data users and hyperscalers who have requested to review the data, according to Tadeparty.

The Bengaluru-based startup has built a team of around 65 professionals and is setting up customer-facing operations in the US and Taiwan as it prepares for initial deployment.

Power provisioning is one of the most important parts of the data-center stack, which is often managed by executives with deep portfolios and years of experience. While many new companies are focused on refactoring individual components, end-to-end power supply innovation requires integrating silicon, packaging, and infrastructure at the same time – a cost-effective strategy that few startups attempt and one that will take years to manifest in manufacturing environments.

Anandan said the real question now is execution, recognizing that all startups face technology, market, and social risks when betting on how industries change. In the case of C2i, he said, the review process should be shorter. “We’ll know in the next six months,” Anandan said, pointing to upcoming silicon and early customer validation as a time when his ideas will be put to the test.

This bet also reflects how India’s semiconductor ecosystem has matured in recent years.

“The way you look at semiconductors in India, this is like 2008 e-commerce,” Anandan said. “I’m just getting started.”

He pointed to the depth of the technology – it’s a growing sector for global equipment manufacturers – along with government-backed incentives that have reduced the cost and risk of tape production, making it possible for startups to start producing globally competitive semiconductor products from India instead of working as slave factories.

Whether these characteristics translate into a globally competitive product will become clear in the coming months, as C2i begins to prove its electronic solutions with customers.