Makr Microsystems Raises ₹10.2 Crore to Help Chipmakers See What's Buried Beneath the Surface

Bengaluru-based Makr Microsystems has raised ₹10.2 crore in a seed round led by frontier-tech investor Bluehill.VC, with participation from Artha Venture Fund, to build metrology tools that let chipmakers see and measure structures buried beneath a semiconductor's surface — without cutting the chip open to look.

The problem: modern chips hide their defects

As chip architectures move from flat, two-dimensional layouts to increasingly three-dimensional ones — advanced packaging, hybrid bonding, chiplets stacked and wired together, buried interconnects between dies — a growing share of what can go wrong with a chip happens somewhere optical inspection tools simply cannot see. Conventional optical metrology works by bouncing light off a surface; it has no way of imaging a void, a misaligned bond or a crack sitting several layers beneath that surface. The standard workaround in the industry today is destructive: cross-section a sample chip, image the exposed layer, and infer that the rest of the batch looks the same. That approach is slow, expensive at scale, and by definition destroys the very chip it inspects.

Makr's pitch is to replace that inference with direct, non-destructive measurement. The company combines Acoustic Atomic Force Microscopy (Acoustic AFM), optical tomography and its own 3D data-analytics software to build a picture of what lies beneath a chip's surface at Angstrom-scale resolution — small enough to resolve individual atomic-layer structures — without slicing the part open.

Who's behind it

Makr was founded in 2024 by Ashwin Lal, who holds a master's degree in physics from IIT Kanpur and a PhD in microtechnology from EPFL Lausanne, alongside Paritosh Kumar. Lal had already built and run one deep-tech company, Shilps Sciences, before Makr, and spent time as an engineer at Applied Materials — one of the world's largest suppliers of semiconductor fabrication and inspection equipment — giving him a direct view of the metrology gap Makr is now trying to close from the outside.

That lineage matters for how the round should be read: this is not a startup guessing at what fabs need from the outside, but one founded by someone who has sat inside the equipment-supplier side of the industry Makr now wants to sell into.

Why this round, and why now

Makr's initial target applications — advanced semiconductor packaging, hybrid bonding, buried interfaces, chiplet interconnects and defect detection — sit squarely inside the part of the chip industry India is currently building out fastest. Under the Semicon 2.0 push, India now has multiple OSAT (outsourced assembly and test) and packaging lines commissioning commercial production in quick succession — Micron and Kaynes Semicon in Sanand, CG Power's Sanand facility built with Renesas, and others moving through the same pipeline. Assembly and packaging is precisely where the failure modes Makr is built to catch — voids, misaligned bonds, hidden cracks in stacked dies — show up, which is also where the metrology gap is most acute as India's packaging capacity scales faster than its inspection-equipment base.

The round's lead investor, Bluehill.VC, is itself a relatively new fixture in India's frontier-tech investing landscape, having closed its own maiden fund at ₹400 crore earlier this year to back exactly this kind of hard-tech, equipment-layer company that sits upstream of the better-known chip-design and fab announcements. Makr's seed is a small round in absolute terms, but it is a bet on a category — semiconductor metrology and test equipment — that India's chip ecosystem has so far imported almost entirely, and where a credible domestic supplier would matter well beyond Makr's own revenue line.

What the money is for

Makr says the capital will go toward continued technology development, customer validation with semiconductor manufacturers, and the company's progression toward commercial deployment — the standard, unglamorous path a hardware-metrology startup has to walk between a working lab demonstration and a tool a fab is willing to qualify and buy. For a company this early, the more telling number to watch over the next year won't be the seed amount itself but whether Makr can land its first paying validation customer among India's newly commissioned OSAT lines.

Sources

• Bluehill VC leads Rs 10.2 Cr seed round in Makr Microsystems — Entrackr
• Frontier Tech Fund Bluehill leads Rs 10.2 crore seed round in Semicon Metrology startup Makr Microsystems — SMEStreet
• Makr Microsystems Raises Rs. 10.2 Crore to Help Chipmakers See Hidden Defects — Newskart
• Bengaluru-Based Semiconductor Metrology Startup Makr Microsystems Raises Rs 10.2 Crore in Seed Round — Indian Startup Times
• Makr Microsystems — Company Profile — Inc42