Every AI breakthrough has an invisible layer of engineering underneath it. Long before a chip lands in a data centre, someone has to prove it will actually work — at billions of operations per second, inside a furnace of heat, without a single misfiring transistor. For more than two decades, a quiet Bengaluru company has been the one doing that proving for the biggest names in silicon. Now it has just raised $75 million to go bigger.
That company is Tessolve Semiconductor, a Hero Electronix venture founded in 2004 by Srini Chinamilli. It began life doing one hard thing — silicon test engineering — and turned that specialisation into a full-stack engineering platform that now carries chips all the way from architecture and design through verification, post-silicon validation, test and embedded systems. Its own tagline for the journey says it best: two decades ago it started with silicon test engineering; today, the company says, it is designing and productising complete chips for the companies building AI infrastructure.
The scale of the operation is remarkable. Tessolve counts more than 4,000 engineers, operates across 12 countries and has released over 1,000 test programmes, with advanced laboratories backing every stage of the silicon lifecycle. Its three engineering pillars — IC design, post-silicon validation and embedded systems — span the exact layer the AI boom runs on: AI chips, high-performance computing and analogue/mixed-signal designs. The company works with leading hyperscalers and, by its own account, 18 of the world’s 20 largest semiconductor companies.
What makes Tessolve’s story exceptional is the timing of its bet. The shift from pure test engineering to designing complete chips demanded sustained investment in capabilities, platforms and talent long before the AI demand arrived — exactly the kind of unglamorous, deep engineering capacity that fabs and assembly plants need around them. The numbers now agree: in September 2025 TPG invested $150 million, and on 11 October 2026 the company announced a $75 million round from Vector Line Capital, a US strategic investor that invests exclusively in semiconductors and the chip supply chain. It is Vector Line’s first investment in India, joining TPG and Novo Tellus as investors.
The backing points to where the value sits in the modern chip economy. As chips get more complex, leading technology companies increasingly hand whole development cycles to engineering partners who can carry work from architecture to silicon to systems — a role Tessolve has spent 22 years preparing for. Its membership in the Intel Foundry Services Accelerator Design Services Alliance, alongside collaboration on advanced EMIB packaging enablement, shows how deeply it is embedded in the global chip ecosystem’s next act.
Tessolve is a Bengaluru-based semiconductor engineering company and a Hero Electronix venture. Founded in 2004 by co-founder and CEO Srini Chinamilli, it offers end-to-end engineering across IC design, post-silicon validation and embedded systems, with focus areas including AI, high-performance computing, 5G, chiplets and advanced packaging. It is backed by Hero Electronix, TPG, Novo Tellus and Vector Line Capital.
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