Chennai: India may get its first home-made LTE chipset, driven by research activities of a team of 50 engineers working in stealth mode in the country’s tech hub Bengaluru, backed by maverick entrepreneur Sridhar Vembu, founder of SaaS major Zoho. Vembu calls the semiconductor creation a “one-of-a kind in India”. An IIT-Madras alumnus, Vembu is credited with building Zoho’s mail and chat services, which the US National Security Agency (NSA) has found difficult to crack as part of its mass surveillance.

Privately held Zoho is among the top software product companies in India and is known to have valuations higher than most unicorns here. However, Vembu is allergic to external private funding, which he says cripples creativity. “An investor will not allow me to spend time on R&D. He will look for returns,” he said. “The LTE modems and all components of a phone are all made outside India, and these are all tech-critical to our national security,” Vembu told TOI in an exclusive chat.

With smartphones dominating our lives, Vembu believes it is essential for India to go beyond being mere consumers of this tech.“It is important for the economy, sovereignty, and security of the country that we build this here,” he adds, explaining his personal motivation behind the project, which he considers akin to his own “private jet”.

Without disclosing further details (a detailed announcement is due in two weeks) on production of the chipsets or OEM tie-ups, Vembu said India has all the talent required to build such a technology right here, and we just need patient capital to “put it all together”. A team of 50 engineers in Bengaluru have been working on the project, entirely funded by Zoho, for over eight years now.

With this project, Zoho’s team would potentially take on giants like Qualcomm, Intel, Huawei and others, head on. As electronics take over our daily lives, semiconductors play a major role in quietly powering the digital revolution. Semiconductors are the core of every digital device today, be it a computer, smartphone or even a car. Semiconductor industry clusters also help build economies in their areas, and create a large amount of value where they are located. “The key is the level of integration we have achieved with the chip, given how crucial it is in semiconductors, and all I can tell you is that it [the tech] is on the infrastructure side, and not on the phone side right now,” Vembu said.