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Tag: IIT Madras

  • How IIT Madras Turned 29 Lakh Bet into 50 Crore Ather Energy Windfall

    Not many will celebrate as quietly yet as triumphantly as IIT Madras when Ather Energy hits the stock market this week. Through its investment arms,  the IIT Madras Incubation Cell and the IITM Rural Technology and Business Incubator,  the institute transformed an early investment of just INR 15–29 lakh into a stake now worth about INR 50 crore. That’s a return of nearly 172x to 333x over 11 years, a number that would make the most seasoned venture capitalists envious.

    A Deep-Rooted Culture of Innovation

    The early support of Ather Energy is not an isolated instance for IIT Madras. With a portfolio of 351 deep tech startups pegged at around INR 45,000 crores by the end of 2023, IITMIC has established itself as a player to watch in India’s entrepreneurial scene. More interestingly, funded by IITMIC, all of these startups have a survival rate of about 80%, that is, when you consider the industry average for startups, which is around 4% to 6%.

    Ather Energy’s public listing is set to benefit more than just IIT Madras. Tiger Global, which invested in 2015, stands to earn 8.3x returns through its Internet Fund Pte by divesting about four lakh shares. Other backers, Singapore’s GIC and India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF), are looking at returns of 1.6x and 1.7x, respectively. Overall, this is a good outcome for Ather’s investors, and it speaks well of their confidence in both Ather and the Indian electric vehicle (EV) sector.

    EV Sector Faces New Challenges

    While investors are elated over the recent gains, it is prudent to keep a level head and focus on the fundamentals of the EV industry and the sizable challenges it faces, some of which we have touched on before. The price of lithium and cobalt, for instance, can only go up if the domestic lithium and cobalt mining business is as environmentally unfriendly as the same business abroad. EV batteries need these minerals, the prices of which are quite unstable. Also, domestic supply chains for EV mineral and battery production are underbuilt, meaning OEMs must rely more on an EV supply chain from China, which is even more worrisome since many Chinese manufacturers have a serious problem with enforcing labor rights and protecting the environment.

    Despite the increasing popularity of EV scooters, this mode of transport still battles some unforgiving issues. A major problem is that of charging infrastructure. Public charging stations are still few and far between, especially beyond urban centers, and that makes anything other than a short, local trip a challenge. Another challenge is high up-front expenditure relative to conventional petrol two-wheelers, despite lower long-term running costs. Consumers are often reticent to put down money without clear assurances of cost-benefit payback. Additionally, some low-cost EV models of sub-optimum quality and reliability are affecting the level of public trust.

  • For ISRO, IIT Madras Designs Indigenous Shakti Semiconductor Chip

    The open-source RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) serves as the foundation for this chip, which is a component of the Shakti family of microprocessors and represents a significant advancement in lowering India’s reliance on imported semiconductor technology. IIT Madras built and implemented the IRIS chip, which was first envisaged by ISRO’s Inertial Systems Unit (IISU) in Thiruvananthapuram.

    In India, every step of the development process—chip design, production, packaging, motherboard assembly, and software booting—was completed. This accomplishment demonstrates India’s capacity to establish a comprehensive semiconductor ecosystem. The goal of IIT Madras’ Shakti project, headed by Prof. V. Kamakoti, is to develop adaptable processors for a range of uses.

    What is IRIS Chip and its Usage?

    Fault-tolerant internal memories and specially designed modules like CORDIC and WATCHDOG Timers are features of the IRIS chip, which is designed for space applications. In addition to other essential tasks for space missions, it is made to satisfy the computational demands of ISRO’s command and control systems.

    Prof. V. Kamakoti, the director of IIT Madras, stressed the value of employing domestic microprocessors for strategic initiatives and national security. “Any computing system’s brain is the CPU. Instead of doing what you don’t want it to, it should do what you want it to,” he said. Greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness are made possible by the Shakti processor’s open-source nature, which also lowers the cost of replacing parts and permits the use of outdated interfaces.

    ISRO Appreciating the Discovery

    The microprocessor design and stress tests have been deemed satisfactory by ISRO experts, who will now move forward with their own testing. In addition to enhancing India’s space capabilities, this partnership between IIT Madras and Isro shows off the nation’s developing semiconductor technological skills and opens the door for more domestic space exploration advancements in the future. The creation of water-free concrete that might be utilised to build buildings on the Moon and Mars was previously disclosed by IIT Madras.

    About ISRO

    The Government of India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has its main office in Bangalore. Its goal is to “harness space technology for national development while pursuing space science research and planetary exploration.” The Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), which was founded in 1962 by Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first independent prime minister, and his close scientist and assistant Vikram Sarabhai, was replaced by ISRO in 1969.

    Thus, the creation of ISRO formalised India’s space endeavours. The Department of Space oversees it and answers to the Indian Prime Minister. Aryabhata, the first satellite created by ISRO for India, was launched by the Soviet Union on April 19, 1975. It bears the name of Aryabhata, the mathematician.

    The SLV-3, an Indian-made launch vehicle, launched Rohini into orbit in 1980, making it the first satellite to do so. Later, ISRO created two further rockets: the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) to place satellites in geostationary orbits and the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) to launch satellites into polar orbits.

    Numerous Earth observation and telecommunication satellites have been launched using these rockets. There has been the deployment of satellite navigation systems such as GAGAN and IRNSS. ISRO launched the GSAT-14 using a domestic cryogenic engine in January 2014.

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  • Perplexity Offers IIT Madras Students Free Subscriptions

    According to Aravind Srinivas, creator and CEO of Perplexity AI, the AI search engine offers its premium subscription plan to staff and students at his alma mater, IIT Madras, for free. All IIT Madras instructors, staff, and students, where the CEO completed his undergraduate studies, have received complimentary Perplexity Pro from the company. In an X post, Srinivas stated that he was “extremely excited to start there as the brand begins its expansion for Indian campuses.” This is consistent with remarks made by Srinivas in December 2024, in which he stated that he was amenable to “figuring out” an economic arrangement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in order to provide Perplexity Pro to Indian academics, faculty, and students.

    He also met with Prime Minister Modi in New Delhi last month to talk about the prospects for AI adoption in India and globally. Srinivas stated that he is prepared to devote $1 million personally and five hours per week to a “group of people” who will make India “great in the context of AI” in a different post on X on January 22. Srinivas added that he is prepared to personally invest $1 million (sic) and five hours per week in the most capable team that can achieve this at this moment to restore India’s greatness in the context of artificial intelligence. Think of this as a promise that is irrevocable. The team must open source the models under an MIT license and be as fixated on it as the DeepSeek team.

    Investing 10 Million More in Indian Startups

    The cofounder of Perplexity added that he would put an additional $10 million into the Indian business if it could “rigorously” outperform DeepSeek R1 on all metrics. Large language models (LLMs) have been created by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which is regarded as a serious rival to OpenAI. To compete with platforms like OpenAI-o1, DeepSeek introduced its newest reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero, earlier this week with less than $4 million in funding.

    Motivating the AI Sector of India

    Pratyush Kumar, a cofounder of SarvamAI, an LLM maker with an Indic focus, responded to the Perplexity cofounder’s post by pitching his own firm. Aravind is creating sovereign models at @SarvamAI, a brand that combines deep reasoning with proficiency in the Indic language. I hope you will join this expedition! Kumar said. This occurs one day after Srinivas caused a stir in the Indian AI community by stating that Indian businesses had to concentrate on building their models from the ground up rather than optimising pre-existing basic models. Srinivas urged Indian businesspeople to demonstrate to the world that they can develop AI with ISRO-like capabilities, despite pointing out that training thinking models is expensive. He was alluding to the Indian space agency’s economical strategy.

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