Semiconductor intelligence startup ThirdAI Automation raises $3 million from Endiya Partners, Capria Ventures

Semiconductor intelligence startup ThirdAI Automation has raised $3 million in a seed funding round co-led by Endiya Partners and Capria Ventures.

Founded in 2024 by Dr Vivek Vishwakarma and Dr Sainyam Galhotra, ThirdAI is developing causal AI for advanced manufacturing environments. The startup partners with semiconductor tool vendors and fabs to improve equipment reliability, reduce unplanned downtime, and increase yield by pinpointing the root causes of tool, process, and field issues.

Its platform integrates equipment logs, sensor data, service/field reports, and technical documentation into a unified causal-intelligence layer that enables faster diagnostics and more resilient fab operations.

The startup will use the raised capital to scale product development, expand teams in India and overseas, and accelerate deployments with equipment manufacturers and semiconductor fabs.

Dr. Vivek Vishwakarma, Co-Founder & CEO, ThirdAI, who brings over a decade of cross-industry experience spanning semiconductors and batteries at Intel and Roche, said, “We’re excited about the support from our investors as we scale ThirdAI. In a modern semiconductor fab, downtime is often triggered by issues engineers already have the data for, but not the clarity to diagnose quickly. ThirdAI is built to surface cause-and-effect relationships directly at the equipment layer, so that teams can act with confidence rather than rely on trial and error.”

Dr. Sainyam Galhotra, Co-founder, ThirdAI, holds a Ph.D. from UMass Amherst, completed postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago, and serves on the faculty at Cornell University.

He said, “This round will provide the momentum required to take our technology deeper into real fab environments. Our long-term vision is to build an operating system for industrial operations, where AI continuously reasons over complex, multimodal data to guide decisions across the manufacturing lifecycle.”

Commenting on the investment, Raghav Gupta, Vice President at Endiya Partners, added, “ThirdAI is tackling a real problem in semiconductor manufacturing, where equipment downtime and process issues persist. Root cause analysis remains largely manual and time-intensive. Their approach has the potential to change that. The founding team combines deep technical expertise with industry experience, and we’re excited to partner with them as they build a transformative platform.”

Surya Mantha, Managing Partner at Capria Ventures, said, “ThirdAI tackles one of the industry’s costliest bottlenecks, turning complex equipment data into clear, actionable causal insights. Their approach can significantly improve uptime and yield in high-volume, production-critical fabs. It is also applicable to other always-on industrial systems like power generation, utilities, and chemical processing, which face similar complexity and constraints.”