India has developed its own satellite navigation system, NavIC, but much of the hardware required to receive its signals is still imported. , an IIT Bombay (IIT-B) spinout, aims to address this gap with an indigenous radio-frequency (RF) chip that can process signals from NavIC and other satellite navigation systems.
Founded in late 2024, the Mumbai-based deeptech startup is commercialising DhruvaPro, a programmable RF chip designed for the front end of navigation receivers. Unlike conventional chips that typically operate on specific frequency bands, DhruvaPro can be programmed to work across different bands, offering greater flexibility.
“We had almost six years of research at IIT-B, initially because there was a government project to develop an RF chip for NavIC. We went through two silicon iterations, both of which were successful, and started getting good feedback from the industry. That’s when we decided to take this technology forward as a company,” says Vijay Kanchetla, Co-founder of MumbaiSemi.
The startup has an 11-member team, including Co-founder Rajesh Zele, who is also a professor at IIT Bombay.
The founder says DhruvaPro is one of India’s first reconfigurable RF navigation receiver chip. An antenna picks up weak, high-frequency satellite signals, while the RF chip filters out unwanted signals, amplifies, down-converts, and digitizes the navigation signals before this binary data reaches the receiver's processor for decoding the receiver's position, velocity, and time.
Kanchetla says the original motivation was to design an RF chip capable of receiving India’s NavIC signals. However, the team decided to make the technology compatible with all global navigation systems.
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