DIR-V Winners Put Indian Chips to Work

The DIR-V winners announced at SEMICON India 2026 turned India’s indigenous SHAKTI and VEGA processor platforms into working prototypes, led by an autonomous robot for cleaning inland water bodies. Three teams shared ₹60 lakh in prize money after a challenge that drew 1,236 teams and 5,045 participants.

Key takeaways

Meevisai Technologies’ Digital Dawgs team won first place with a water-surface cleaning robot using IIT Madras’s SHAKTI processor.
Digiscope’s Binary Bandits placed second, and Zetawave Technologies’ Neurobytes team placed third.
The programme links processor access, prototype funding and incubation, making deployment—not benchmark publicity—the useful measure.

Who the DIR-V winners are

The Digital India RISC-V Grand Challenge was organised by Maker Village under the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s Chips to Startup programme. MeitY’s September 19 release and the official challenge page name the same three winners and prize structure; YourStory independently reported the concluding announcements from SEMICON India.

First-place winner Meevisai Technologies represented Team Digital Dawgs from SASTRA University. Its autonomous robot is designed to collect waste from ponds and temple tanks. Digiscope LLP’s Binary Bandits team from ER&DCI Institute of Technology took second place, while Zetawave Technologies’ Neurobytes team from the Indian Institute of Science placed third.

Why the challenge design matters

RISC-V is an open instruction-set architecture, but an open specification alone does not create a domestic product industry. Teams still need processor implementations, boards, software tools, mentors and a route to customers. The DIR-V challenge packages those inputs around Indian-developed SHAKTI and VEGA systems-on-chip.

The water-cleaning robot is a useful lead example because it makes the processor’s role concrete. The commercial question is whether the system can operate reliably outside a demonstration tank: variable debris, water conditions, power budgets, maintenance and municipal procurement will determine whether it becomes a product.

That execution test mirrors other Indian deep-tech efforts, including gas-turbine startup funding and semiconductor support for satcom chips.

> The DIR-V winners show the value of indigenous processors only when those chips leave a development board and control a working system; the next proof point is repeatable field deployment, not another laboratory demo.

What happens after the prize

The official programme offers incubation support and had supplied boards and staged prototype funding to shortlisted teams. Prize money can extend testing, but hardware startups usually need longer support for enclosure design, certification, manufacturing and customer trials.

The strongest outcome would be a published trail from prototype to deployment: operating hours, failure modes, unit economics and procurement partners. Those measures would show whether the challenge creates companies and public-use products rather than ending at awards.