Heat kills electronics. So, a materials scientist in Bengaluru spent a decade solving the problem
Helionis Labs builds circuit boards that shed heat better and cost less, using a material and process developed in-house.
Electronics fail when they get too hot. As devices are packed with more power in less space, from LED lights and electric vehicle systems to telecom equipment, getting heat out of them has become a limiting factor in how they are designed.
One of the components that does this work is an insulated metal substrate, a circuit board built on a metal base that draws heat away from the parts mounted on it.
The layer that makes it work is the dielectric, a material that insulates electrically while still letting heat through. But India imports most of its supply.
Helionis Labs, a Bengaluru-based startup, is making that material domestically. It was founded in 2024 by Tarun Jha, a materials scientist who has worked on the problem for more than a decade.
Jha completed his master's degree at the University of Florida and worked at companies in the United States and India before setting up a bootstrapped lab in 2024 to develop the alternative. The company reached a workable version of the product in 2025.
Working on materials is slower than most hardware. A new formulation has to be developed, then made consistently, then certified, and only then can a manufacturer be persuaded to build a product around it.
Printing the material onto metal
Conventional boards of this type depend on imported material and a chemical-heavy manufacturing process. Helionis has developed its own dielectric material and a process that prints it directly onto aluminium.
The company says this produces boards that move heat away more effectively, using a thinner dielectric layer, at a lower manufacturing cost. It positions the product as a direct replacement for conventional metal core printed circuit boards, so a customer can adopt it without redesigning around it.
“Heat is one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern electronics, from LED lighting to EV power systems and telecom infrastructure,” says Jha. “At Helionis, we started from the materials level and rebuilt the thermal substrate stack around additive manufacturing and proprietary dielectric technology.”
The additive approach, depositing material rather than cutting it from larger sheets, is the part that remains unproven at production scale. It works in the lab, and the question is whether it will hold up in volume.
Piloting with LED makers
Helionis is running pilots with two to three large LED manufacturers in India. Lighting is a sensible first market, because heat is a well-known cause of failure in LED products and the buyers are large and concentrated.
Beyond lighting, the company is aiming at electric vehicle power electronics, telecom infrastructure and industrial automation, all of which face the same constraint.
Electric vehicles are the larger opportunity of the three. Power electronics in a vehicle run hot, are safety-critical, and are being built in growing volumes in India, which makes a domestic supplier valuable to manufacturers.
In June 2026, the company raised a pre-seed round from Transition VC, with the amount kept undisclosed. The money is going into materials research, hiring engineers, completing product certifications and reliability testing, running prototype programmes with manufacturers, and setting up a pilot production line.
The market Helionis is entering is dominated by suppliers abroad, and its investor has been candid that India's thermal dielectric layer is still largely imported. Breaking that pattern means proving both performance and cost at scale.
That is what the next stage of the company will be. A pilot line, a set of certifications and a few manufacturers willing to build products around the material would move it from a laboratory result to a supply business.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)