Chennai-based fabless semiconductor startup Mindgrove Technologies has teamed up with ed-tech company AtumX to launch AGNI, a developer board built around an indigenously designed chip, aimed at government school classrooms. The initiative marks one of the first attempts to put a domestically designed SoC directly into the hands of students rather than professional engineers.
The rollout begins in five government schools in Chennai, with an initial reach of nearly 1,000 students, supported by the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), a Government of India program for fostering entrepreneurship and innovation. The companies plan to expand the program to schools in additional cities in the coming months, with a stated goal of extending access to tier-2 and tier-3 towns.
At the hardware level, AGNI is powered by Mindgrove's Secure IoT SoC, a microcontroller the company introduced in 2024. That chip is built around a Shakti C-Class core, a 64-bit RISC-V single-core processor capable of running up to 700 MHz, and is fabricated on a 28nm process. It includes hardware-accelerated security functions, secure boot, and on-chip programmable memory, features Mindgrove has previously marketed toward IoT, automotive, and industrial applications rather than education specifically.
For the classroom deployment, AtumX has built a custom IDE that lets students move from block-based programming to AI-oriented coding on the same board, a familiar progression pattern in STEM education kits but notable here for running on locally fabricated silicon rather than imported microcontrollers.
Mindgrove, founded in 2021 and incubated at IIT Madras, has raised roughly $10.3 million to date across three funding rounds from investors including Peak XV Partners and Speciale Invest. The AGNI launch positions the developer board as an entry point into a broader pipeline, with Mindgrove citing additional chip launches ahead aimed at engineers and OEMs beyond the education sector.
