BMS IC Chips: Building Conviction in a Niche Semiconductor Segment
Ran end-to-end primary research on a battery management semiconductor startup, backtracking from industry users to validate a novel on-chip EIS capability.
Naman Bhardwaj
Investment Analyst at Udyat Ventures
From their time as
Investment Analyst
Udyat Ventures • 2025
Overview
Naman came across this startup while building a broader sector map of India's EV and energy storage supply chain. The company was building a single-chip BMS IC, a system-on-chip that consolidates battery management functions into one programmable semiconductor, with a proprietary on-chip EIS capability. The team at Udyat had no semiconductor background, and the segment was niche even within the broader IC market.
The Story
Naman came across this startup while building a broader sector map of India's EV and energy storage supply chain. The company was building a single-chip BMS IC, a system-on-chip that consolidates battery management functions into one programmable semiconductor, with a proprietary on-chip EIS capability. The team at Udyat had no semiconductor background, and the segment was niche even within the broader IC market.
In the first week, Naman focused on sector-level orientation, working through reports from McKinsey, Bain, and Red Seer to understand the BMS IC market, its size, and where it sat within the broader semiconductor landscape. He quickly identified that the automotive BMS segment was substantially smaller than the GPU and CPU segments dominating semiconductor growth, which meant standard market reports gave limited signal.
The second week shifted to primary research. Naman reached out directly to engineers and procurement leads at Ather, Hero, and RPSG to understand whether the problem the company was solving was real and whether buyers would pay for it. His working hypothesis was that the cost of the solution would not justify the features. That view changed through the conversations.
What the expert interviews surfaced was that no existing BMS system accurately measures true battery health. Most systems use crude proxy measures, voltage curves and coulomb counting, which drift over time. The company's EIS capability, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy run continuously on-chip, gave a far more precise picture of state of charge and state of health. Crucially, EIS had historically been a lab instrument. Running it in real time on a chip inside a moving EV was genuinely novel.
Naman also identified the technical differentiation that made the capability defensible: the company was applying a 10-ampere current signal compared to the 1-ampere standard used by Texas Instruments and Analog Devices. The higher current produced a better signal-to-noise ratio, enabling accurate measurement of battery chemistry at a molecular level. That specification was patentable.
He compiled the findings into an IC note and investment memo, which he presented to the partners. The EIS insight, grounded in expert validation from the demand side, was the part of the research that moved the partners to proceed.