In 2007, Dheemanth Nagaraj left Hewlett Packard in the United States and moved back to his home town of Bengaluru, because, he says, he wanted to "continue working on cutting edge technology and microprocessors." It was at HP that he had first glimpsed what Intel was building, and he joined Intel's Bengaluru design centre as a senior technical lead, one rank below a principal engineer. Eight years later, Intel needed a data-centre chip that was not more powerful but more efficient, and Nagaraj conceived and built it. The Xeon D used between 20 and 70 watts where a regular Xeon chip drew up to 200, and Facebook became one of its biggest users. In 2018 he became the first person from Intel's India Design Centre, in its twenty-year history, to be named an Intel Fellow, a title held by only about 80 people in the company's 50 years. He later became a Senior Fellow at AMD, and in 2024 he co-founded Agrani Labs in Bengaluru with Ashok Jagannathan, Srikanth Nimmagadda and Rajesh Vivekanandham, all former Intel and AMD engineers, a team the company says has more than 100 years of combined experience. What they are building is a high-performance GPU for AI in data centres, together with its own compilers, libraries, system software and AI frameworks, an approach the company says is meant to lower the hurdles of adopting a new platform. In January 2026 it came out of stealth with an $8 million seed round led by Peak XV Partners, and Vinod Dham, widely known as the "Father of the Pentium", joined as a founding advisor. The company says it has already built early versions of its hardware and software stack. Peak XV's Ashish Agrawal said at the time that the firm was backing a team that "aspire to build one of the world's leading fabless semiconductor companies, from India." In October, the Economic Times reported that Agrani is in talks to raise ₹800 to 850 crore from Samsung, 360 ONE and Peak XV at a post-money valuation of about ₹2,400 to 2,500 crore, which would make it one of the largest early-stage raises by an Indian semiconductor company. The round has not been confirmed as closed. The first chip he led at Intel's Bengaluru centre went into servers for banks and stock exchanges, and the one he is building now is a GPU for AI data centres.