Bengaluru : ThirdAI Automation has raised $3 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Endiya Partners and Capria Ventures. The capital will be used to scale product development, expand teams in India and overseas, and accelerate deployments with equipment manufacturers and semiconductor fabs.
Founded in 2024 by Dr Vivek Vishwakarma and Dr Sainyam Galhotra, ThirdAI is an India–US based company with global operations. ThirdAI builds AI-powered RCA and troubleshooting platform for semiconductor manufacturing, using causal AI to diagnose failures faster, reduce unplanned downtime, and improve yield in production-critical environments.
The AI boom is pushing material complexity higher, even as fabs and toolmakers hit physical limits — driving yields down as chips grow more complex. Despite large investments in industrial analytics, existing solutions focus on prediction or anomaly detection and offer limited support when a tool goes down. Root cause analysis (RCA)in semiconductor fabs remains largely manual, requiring engineers to spend 20–40 hours per incident analysing data across multiple systems.
ThirdAI addresses this gap with Causal AI, an emerging technology well-suited to strategically address crucial bottlenecks in complex manufacturing. Leveraging a causal AI–powered RCA copilot that automates the process by identifying precise cause-and-effect relationships across equipment logs, sensor data, images, and operational records, ThirdAI enables engineers to move quickly from failure to resolution.
In pilot and production environments, ThirdAI has demonstrated:
- Up to 80% reduction in diagnostic time compared to manual RCA workflows
- Over 90% diagnostic accuracyversus expert-led manual methods
- 30–50% lower onboarding and deployment costs compared to custom analytics solutions (Based on pilot deployments and customer environments)
ThirdAI’s efforts are directly aligned with the vision laid out by the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), particularly ISM 2.0, which aims to develop capabilities in equipment, materials, and Indian IP.
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.”
Commenting on the investment, 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.”
