MumbaiSemi builds the receiver chip that lets a device use India's navigation satellites
The IIT Bombay spinout designs a single radio chip that tunes to NavIC, GPS, Galileo and BeiDou.
India runs its own satellite navigation system. NavIC, built by ISRO, covers the country and a region around it, and it exists so that Indian positioning does not depend on a constellation somebody else controls. But the problem was never there with the flights; it has always been on the ground.
A navigation satellite is useless without a chip to hear it. Those chips are made by a small number of companies, almost none in India, and for years the devices sold here could pick up GPS but not NavIC, because no commercial receiver supported it.
was founded in 2024 to close that gap commercially. It came out of IIT Bombay, where its two founders had already spent years on the problem.
Vijay Kanchetla took his doctorate in radio frequency integrated circuit design at the institute and worked at Intel before that. Professor Rajesh Zele teaches in the electrical engineering department and holds a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon. The company is incubated at SINE, the institute's technology business incubator.
One chip, four constellations
The technology started as a research project called Dhruva, funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with SAMEER as the nodal agency, and built by students and researchers in Zele's laboratory. The first silicon came back from the foundry in December 2019. Zele has said the chip was designed in 18 months and was the first receiver chip from his laboratory designed entirely by students.
What the design does is tune. A conventional receiver is built for particular frequency bands, so supporting several navigation systems usually means several chips or a change in hardware. The team's published work describes a receiver that is fully programmable across the bands used by NavIC, GPS, Galileo and BeiDou, with no external components and no change to the on-chip hardware between them.
The engineering problem underneath is faintness. A signal arriving from a satellite is far weaker than the noise around it, and Zele's account of the chip describes sifting out the navigation signal and amplifying it roughly 400,000 times before converting it to digital on the same chip.
The commercial version is DhruvaPro. MumbaiSemi describes it as silicon-proven, meaning fabricated and tested rather than simulated, and says it holds two patents on the design. Fewer external components around the chip also means a smaller and cheaper receiver module, which is what a device maker is actually buying.
An award, and a company still at the start
The work has been recognised inside the institute. IIT Bombay conferred its Dr P. K. Patwardhan Technology Development Award for 2024 on Zele and Kanchetla for DhruvaPro, presented on National Engineers' Day.
The underlying research has also been peer-reviewed. A paper describing the receiver, with Kanchetla as lead author and Zele among the co-authors, appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques in March 2022, which is a stronger form of external validation than most companies in this field can point to.
The company was among those shown at Bharat Innovates in Nice in June 2026, where it described looking for partners in communications and navigation rather than announcing customers of its own.
What is not public is the commercial position. No customer, order, revenue figure or reliable funding amount has been disclosed, and the step from a silicon-proven chip to one being bought in volume is the one the company still has to take.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)