Peak XV leads $15M round in C2i to cut data-center power loss
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- C2i Semiconductors raised $15 million in a Series A led by Peak XV Partners, with Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures participating, bringing the two-year-old Bengaluru startup's total funding to $19 million.
- The company is building plug-and-play 'grid-to-GPU' power systems that integrate conversion, control, and packaging as a single platform, targeting roughly a 10% reduction in end-to-end energy losses — about 100 kilowatts saved for every megawatt consumed.
- Founded in 2024 by six former Texas Instruments power executives including CTO Preetam Tadeparthy, C2i has assembled a team of about 65 engineers and is establishing customer-facing operations in the U.S. and Taiwan.
- Data-center power conversion currently wastes 15% to 20% of energy, per Tadeparthy, with BloombergNEF projecting data-center electricity consumption will nearly triple by 2035 and Goldman Sachs Research estimating a 175% surge in power demand by 2030 from 2023 levels.
- C2i expects its first two silicon designs to return from fabrication between April and June, after which it plans to validate performance with hyperscalers and data-center operators that have requested the data.
- Peak XV managing director Rajan Anandan compared India's semiconductor design ecosystem to '2008 e-commerce,' pointing to government design-linked incentives and a growing share of global chip designers based in the country as enablers for chip startups.
- The voltage architecture in data centers is already moving from 400V to 800V and will likely climb higher, Tadeparthy said — a shift that makes integrated power delivery more pressing.
Why it matters: Peak XV's bet turns on a tight math problem: after upfront capital, energy is the dominant ongoing cost for data centers, and C2i's founders — veteran TI power engineers — claim their integrated 'grid-to-GPU' systems shave 10% off end-to-end losses. The thesis gets a hard test in roughly six months when first silicon returns from fabrication and hyperscalers review the data.
