7th April 2025: Calligo Technologies, a pioneering semiconductor startup, has raised $1.1 million in a pre-series A round led by Seafund and Artha Venture Fund.
CalligoTech’s products are focussed at Accelerating High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI` workloads with its innovative implementation of POSIT in silicon.
The funds raised will be used for R&D expenses for developing the ver2.0 Silicon chip and platform. In addition to the previous breakthrough with the POSIT-based ver1.0 silicon semiconductor chip, the company is also planning to further increase its engineering talent and tech capabilities to build va er2.0 Semiconductor products and establish partnerships with System-Integrators and OEMs/ODMs.
Founded by Anantha Kinnal, Rajaraman Subramanian, and Vinay N Hebbali, Calligo Technologies is focused on developing products and solutions for HPC, Big Data, and AI workloads. The company aims to solve the performance bottlenecks of computing needed for large-scale modeling and simulations in HPC systems and large-model training and inference needed in AI systems, a critical need in a market with large computational needs.
In the last 12 months, CalligoTech has collaborated with US universities, national laboratories, and supercomputing centers to improve access to tech talent and soft launch its operations in the US.
The company has also built an accelerator board, received First Pass Silicon Ver1.0, and started shipping to customers.
Commenting on the investment, Narendra Bhandari, General Partner, Seafund, says,“Compute requirement is growing exponentially across the globe. CalligoTech chips and platform improves performance and reduces data power consumption with their innovative approach. They have completed the full chip cycle from design to products in v1.0 and are accelerating to tapeout the nextgen silicon.”
Anantha Kinnal, Co-founder and CEO of CalligoTech adds, “Insatiable demand for computing for HPC/AI has thus far been addressed by adding more and more Hardware, without addressing computing efficiency at grass-root levels. POSIT is a game-changing invention for real-number representation, as it tackles this issue by enabling the use of fewer computing bits for the same or improved mathematical accuracy, higher energy efficiency, and an increase in dynamic range. Combining Posits with RISC-V, our current version of Silicon TUNGA – an Octacore RISC-V CPU – powers our accelerator card that can be added to any X86/ARM/PowerPC-based Servers. This is already enabling researchers worldwide to realize the usefulness of Posit-based computing.”
Speaking on the investment, Anirudh A Damani, Managing Partner of Artha Venture Fund, says, “With AI and HPC workloads growing exponentially, computing efficiency is more critical than ever. Calligo’s POSIT-based chips solve fundamental performance bottlenecks, enabling faster, more precise, and power-efficient computing at scale. As demand for large-scale modeling and AI training surges, we see POSIT as a game-changing innovation poised to become a new standard in computing.”
CalligoTech has modified RISC-V C/C++/gFortran/Python compilers, frameworks, and libraries to support Posits and generate Posit-enabled executables natively. Importantly, CalligoTech’s approach requires no source-level modifications to run HPC/AI applications.
“We are very excited to receive new investments from Seafund and Artha to build ver2.0 of our Silicon—a 64-core Posit-enabled RISC-V System-on-Chip for large-scale deployment for HPC/AI computing, “ Anantha added.
In the next 12-18 months, the company plans to capture the market by allowing customers to experience its current product and tape out its System-on-Chip (ver2.0 of Silicon) for high-volume manufacturing.
According to Custom Market Insights, India’s Semiconductor Market was valued at USD 6.67 Billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 14.09 Billion by 2032, at a CAGR of 10.1% during the forecast period 2024 – 2032. CalligoTech is well-positioned to become a global leader with a substantial market to build.