A Hosur firm wants Rs 100 crore to grow 12-inch silicon
Raana Semiconductors is closing a Series A to scale its crystal pullers. India still imports the wafers those machines are meant to make.
Raana Semiconductors, a Hosur firm that builds machines for growing single crystals, is in talks to raise about Rs 100 crore.
Founder Rajasekar Elavarasan told Inc42 the Series A should close by October. An Indian venture fund is expected to lead with Rs 50 crore to Rs 60 crore. Another seven or eight investors may join. Digitimes put the raise at $10.4 million.
The round comes about seven months after a $3 million seed led by Equirus Innovatex Fund and Artha Venture Fund. Raana was founded in 2015. It designs Czochralski pullers, the furnaces that melt high-purity silicon and draw it into one crystal. Those ingots are sliced into wafers for solar cells and chips.
It has sold gear to BARC, DRDO, IGCAR, RRCAT, C-MET and NPL. Revenue in the year to March 2026 was Rs 10.5 crore, Elavarasan said. Most of that still comes from labs and defence buyers who test the kit.
The new money is meant to take the puller from 6 inches to 12 inches. Vice president of technology Avinash Kumar said the 6-inch design exists. The work now is the hot zone, the chamber and the thermal profile. After a pilot line, the firm wants two to three months to lock a process recipe, then a demo for customers. Near term it wants solar manufacturers. Chip plants come later. A pilot silicon plant in Tamil Nadu is also on the list.
India talks a lot about fabs. The quieter gap is the kit that sits upstream.
A 12-inch silicon puller sits upstream of a foundry. It makes the crystal the fab still has to import. Raana is still a Rs 10.5 crore lab supplier. Rs 100 crore is a lot of money for that company and a rounding error next to a wafer plant. The test is whether the 12-inch unit grows semiconductor-grade crystal, and whether anyone who makes wafers will buy it.
Maybe this is how a domestic equipment bench starts. Maybe it stays a DRDO-and-BARC story with a larger furnace. The raise will not answer that. The pilot line might.
The close is due in October. Watch who leads, and whether the 12-inch demo is in front of a solar customer or only another national lab.