Why we built a fabless company in Coimbatore (and not Bengaluru)

Most Indian chip startups set up in Bengaluru. We picked Coimbatore. People ask why, so here is the short version.

The cost stack actually closes here

Engineering salaries in Coimbatore are 25 to 35 per cent below Bengaluru for equivalent experience, and the gap widens at the senior end where physical-design and verification leads are scarce nationally but extraordinarily scarce in Bengaluru, where the multinationals have already absorbed them at premium rates. For a small fabless company spending two crore per year on engineers, that delta is the difference between making payroll and making payroll plus running a regression cluster.

Real estate, office costs, and cost of living all move in the same direction. None of these by themselves justify a move, but stacked they buy us a quarter or two of runway on the same balance sheet — and runway is the thing that determines whether a fabless company sees first silicon or not.

The talent pipeline is real, not hypothetical

PSG Tech, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, GCT, and Kumaraguru graduate strong electronics and VLSI students every year. Many of them go to Bengaluru because that is where the jobs are. We give them a serious VLSI engagement in their own city.

The precision-engineering ecosystem matters

Coimbatore has Pricol, LMW, Roots, ELGI, and several hundred precision machining shops — companies that already supply parts to global manufacturing chains. That matters for two reasons. First, evaluation boards, test fixtures, and small enclosures get built locally on short turns. Second, the operational discipline of running a precision-engineering business — documentation, traceability, calibration, on-time delivery — is in the water here. Translating that into chip design is easier than building it from scratch.

Tamil Nadu is leaning in

The Tamil Nadu Semiconductor Mission 2030 has earmarked five hundred crore for design, manufacturing, testing, and skilling. The Sulur and Palladam semiconductor parks are under development, and the state stacks an additional fifty per cent reimbursement on top of the central Design Linked Incentive for approved projects. None of these subsidies are wired to your bank account on day one — they are reimbursement-based, and you have to spend first to claim later — but they meaningfully change the math at the two-year mark when you can claim against your actual spending.

What this is not

It is not a knock on Bengaluru. The MNCs and the bulk of Indian fabless talent are there for good reasons, and we partner with people in Bengaluru constantly. Most of our customers are likely to be there, too. It is just not where we need to spend our overheads.

Coimbatore is where we build the company. The customers are wherever the customers are.