Peak XV backs Indian startup C2i to tackle AI data center power bottleneck

Power availability, rather than raw computing capacity, is rapidly becoming the primary constraint for scaling AI data centers. This shift has prompted Peak XV Partners to invest in C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup that builds plug-and-play, system-level power solutions designed to reduce energy waste and improve the economic viability of large-scale AI infrastructure.

C2i — short for control, conversion, and intelligence — has secured $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures. This brings the two-year-old startup’s total funding to $19 million.

The investment arrives as data-center energy consumption accelerates globally. According to a December 2025 BloombergNEF report, electricity use from data centers is projected to nearly triple by 2035. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs Research estimates that data-center power demand could surge 175% by 2030 compared to 2023 levels — equivalent to adding another top-10 power-consuming country.

Much of that strain stems not from generating electricity but from converting it efficiently inside data centers, where high-voltage power must be stepped down thousands of times before reaching GPUs. This process currently wastes about 15% to 20% of energy, said C2i co-founder and CTO Preetam Tadeparthy in an interview.

“What used to be 400 volts has already moved to 800 volts, and will likely go higher,” Tadeparthy told TechCrunch.

Founded in 2024 by former Texas Instruments power executives Ram Anant, Vikram Gakhar, Preetam Tadeparthy, and Dattatreya Suryanarayana, along with Harsha S. B and Muthusubramanian N. V, C2i is redesigning power delivery as a single, plug-and-play “grid-to-GPU” system that spans from the data-center bus to the processor itself.

By treating power conversion, control, and packaging as an integrated platform, C2i estimates it can cut end-to-end losses by roughly 10% — saving about 100 kilowatts per megawatt consumed — with cascading benefits for cooling costs, GPU utilization, and overall data-center economics.

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“All that translates directly into total cost of ownership, revenue, and profitability,” Tadeparthy said.

For Peak XV Partners — which split from Sequoia Capital in 2023 — the appeal lies in how power costs shape the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure. Rajan Anandan, the venture firm’s managing director, told TechCrunch that after the upfront capital investment in servers and facilities, energy becomes the dominant ongoing expense for data centers, making even incremental efficiency gains extremely valuable.

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

The claims will soon be put to the test. C2i expects its first two silicon designs to return from fabrication between April and June. After that, the startup plans to validate performance with data-center operators and hyperscalers that have already asked to review the data, according to Tadeparthy.

The Bengaluru-based startup has assembled a team of about 65 engineers and is setting up customer-facing operations in the U.S. 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 resources and multi-year qualification cycles. While many newer companies focus on improving individual components, redesigning power delivery end-to-end requires coordinating silicon, packaging, and system architecture simultaneously — a capital-intensive path that few startups attempt and one 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 C2i’s case, he added, the feedback loop should be relatively short. “We’ll know in the next six months,” Anandan said, pointing to upcoming silicon and early customer validation as the moment when the thesis will be tested.

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

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

He highlighted the depth of engineering talent — with a growing share of global chip designers based in the country — along with government-backed design-linked incentives that have lowered the cost and risk of tape-outs, making it increasingly viable for startups to build globally competitive semiconductor products from India rather than operating only as captive design centers.

Whether those conditions translate into a globally competitive product will become clearer in the coming months, as C2i begins validating its system-level power solutions with customers.