Sumit Vishwakarma03 Sep <a href="https://bitcomme.com/top-influencer-marketing-agencies-2026/” title=”Top Influencer Marketing Agencies (2026)”>2026
15:03IST
New Update
Makr Microsystems, a semiconductor metrology startup, has raised Rs 10.2 crore in a seed funding round led by Bluehill VC, a venture capital fund focused on frontier technology.
Artha Venture Fund also participated in the round.
The startup said the funds will go towards further technology development, validating the product with customers, and moving closer to commercial deployment.
As chips have become smaller and more complex, a lot of what actually matters inside them has moved below the surface. Advanced packaging, chiplets, and 3D chip architectures now depend on interfaces and connections that sit buried under several layers of material. Being able to see and measure these hidden structures matters a great deal, since it helps manufacturers understand how a chip was actually built, catch defects, and improve yield.
The tools available for this today are already fairly advanced, but each comes with some compromise. Depending on the technique used, engineers have to trade off between resolution, how deep they can see, how fast the measurement is, and whether the chip sample gets damaged in the process.
Makr is developing a new approach aimed at high resolution, non-destructive subsurface measurement.
The startup’s core technology is called Acoustic Atomic Force Microscopy, or AAFM. In simple terms, it combines atomic force microscopy with acoustic sensing, using acoustic signals to gather information beneath the surface that conventional surface based techniques can struggle to access.
Makr is turning this into a platform meant for high resolution, non-destructive inspection of what lies beneath a chip’s surface. It is currently targeting use cases such as advanced packaging, hybrid bonding, buried interfaces, chiplet interconnects, and defect detection.
“Semiconductor manufacturing is creating structures that are increasingly difficult to see and measure. As architectures move into the third dimension, understanding what is happening beneath the surface becomes critical to improving yield. Our goal is to make the subsurface measurable, non-destructively and at the resolution the next generation of chipmaking demands,” said founder Ashwin Lal.
Ashwin Lal holds a Master’s in Physics from IIT Kanpur and a PhD in Microtechnology from EPFL. He had earlier founded Shilps Sciences and worked as an engineer at Applied Materials.
Manu Iyer, General Partner at Bluehill VC, said, “We are excited about companies that sit deeper in critical technology value chains. Makr is solving a difficult problem in semiconductor manufacturing at a time when the industry is moving toward increasingly complex architectures. We believe this is a global opportunity, and that world-class semiconductor equipment and technology can be built from India.”
