Power, not compute, is quickly becoming the limiting factor in scaling AI data centers. This change prompted Peak XV Partners to support C2i Semiconductorsan Indian startup that builds plug-and-play system-level power solutions designed to reduce energy losses and improve the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure.
C2i (which stands for conversion control and intelligence) raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the two-year-old startup’s total funding to $19 million.
The investment comes as energy demand for data centers accelerates globally. Data center electricity consumption is projected to nearly triple by 2035, according to a December 2025 BloombergNEF report, while Goldman Sachs Research estimates data center energy demand could increase by 175% by 2030 from 2023 levels — the equivalent of adding another top-10 energy-consuming country.
Much of this pressure comes not from generating electricity but from converting it efficiently inside data centers, where high-voltage power must be reduced thousands of times before reaching the GPUs. This process currently wastes about 15% to 20% of energy, C2i co-founder and CTO Preetam Tadeparthy said in an interview.
“What was 400 volts has already moved to 800 volts and will probably go higher,” Tadeparthy told TechCrunch.
Founded in 2024 by former Texas Instruments executives Ram Anant, Vikram Gakhar, Preetam Tadeparthy and Dattatreya Suryanarayana, along with Harsha S. B and Muthususubramanian N. V, C2i is reimagining power delivery as a single, plug-and-play “network on data processing bus”.
By treating power conversion, control, and packaging as an integrated platform, C2i estimates it can reduce end-to-end losses by about 10%—about 100 kilowatts saved for every megawatt consumed—with negative implications for cooling costs, GPU utilization, and overall data center economics.
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“All of this translates directly into total cost of ownership, revenue and profitability,” Tadeparthy said.
For Peak XV Partners (which split from Sequoia Capital in 2023), the attraction lies in how energy costs shape the economics of AI infrastructure at scale. Rajan Anandan, CEO of the venture capital firm, told TechCrunch that after the initial capital investment in servers and facilities, energy costs become the dominant ongoing expense for data centers, making even incremental efficiency gains extremely valuable.
“If you can reduce energy costs by, you name it, 10 to 30 percent, that’s like a huge number,” Anandan said. “You’re talking tens of billions of dollars.”
Claims will be tested quickly. C2i expects its first two silicon designs to return from manufacturing between April and June, after which the startup plans to validate performance with data center operators and hyperscalers who have asked to review the data, according to Tadeparthy.
The Bengaluru-based startup has built a team of around 65 engineers and is building customer-facing businesses in the US and Taiwan as it prepares for early deployments.
Power delivery is one of the most entrenched parts of the data center stack, long dominated by large incumbents with deep balance sheets and multi-year certification cycles. While many newer companies focus on improving individual components, end-to-end power delivery redesign requires tuning silicon, packaging and system architecture simultaneously — a capital-intensive approach that few startups attempt and that can take years to prove in production environments.
Anandan said the real question now is execution, noting that all startups face technology, market and team risks when betting on how industries evolve. In the case of the C2i, he said, the feedback loop should be relatively short. “We’ll know in the next six months,” Anandan said, pointing to upcoming silicon validation and timely customer validation by the time the thesis is tested.
The bet also reflects how India’s semiconductor design ecosystem has matured in recent years.
“The way you have to look at semiconductors in India is, it’s like e-commerce in 2008,” Anandan said. “It’s just getting started.”
He pointed to the depth of engineering talent – with a growing share of world-class chip designers based in the country – along with government-backed design incentives that have reduced the cost and risk of tape-outs, making it increasingly viable for start-ups to manufacture globally competitive semiconductor products from India rather than operating only as design hubs.
Whether these conditions translate into a globally competitive product will become clearer in the coming months as C2i begins to validate system-level power solutions with its customers.
