Founded in 2024 by Dr. Vivek Vishwakarma and Dr. Sainyam Galhotra, ThirdAI is developing causal artificial intelligence solutions for semiconductor tool vendors and fabs, helping diagnose failures, reduce downtime and improve production yield.ThirdAI Automation has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by Endiya Partners and Capria Ventures.
Founded in 2024 by Dr. Vivek Vishwakarma and Dr. Sainyam Galhotra, ThirdAI is developing causal artificial intelligence solutions for semiconductor tool vendors and fabs, helping diagnose failures, reduce downtime and improve production yield.
“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,” said Dr. Vishwakarma.
He has previously worked at the likes of Intel and Roche.
“The founding team combines deep technical expertise with industry experience, and we’re excited to partner with them as they build a transformative platform,” said Raghav Gupta, vice president at Endiya Partners.
The Bengaluru-based startup said it will use the fresh funding to boost product development, expand teams both domestically and overseas, and support deployment with equipment manufacturers and semiconductor fabs.
“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,” said Dr. Galhotra, who is also a faculty member at Cornell University.
Across pilot and some customer environments, ThirdAI claims to have helped reduce diagnostic time by up to 80 per cent compared to manual root cause analysis workflows and demonstrated over 90 per cent accuracy versus manual methods.
The startup also claims 30-50 per cent lower onboarding and deployment costs compared to custom analytics solutions.
“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,” said Surya Mantha, managing partner at Capria Ventures.
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