ARC has raised ₹10.5 crore in pre-seed funding led by Chimera VC and MIXI Global Investments to build ARC X1, a handheld games console with its own operating system. That is roughly $1.2 million to do hardware and software at once. ARC has raised₹10.5 croreto build a handheld games console, its own operating system, and the software layer that makes PC games run on it. It is a pre-seed round, and that is the number to hold on to while reading the rest. The Bengaluru company announced it on 8 September 2026, led by Chimera VC and MIXI Global Investments, with Dhruv Vohra, a director at Meta in Asia Pacific, investing personally. Founders Jobin Joseph and Kaustubh K. Jadhav are building ARC X1, a portable gaming system aimed at Indian players. Consumer hardware is unusually unforgiving of small budgets, because the work does not compress. ARC has to finish industrial design, integrate an ARM chip, pay for tooling, get through certification, line up contract manufacturing, and build a supply chain that can deliver a physical product to buyers. Each of those has a cost floor that does not care how lean the team is, and tooling in particular is a cheque you write before a single unit ships. On top of all that, ARC is also writing an operating system. Most companies at this funding level are choosing between hardware and software; this one has taken on both, which is either the reason it can differentiate or the reason it runs out of runway, and the next twelve months will settle which. The release is explicit that the money goes into hardware engineering, product validation, manufacturing and supply-chain readiness, plus further work on the OS, team, and go-to-market. That is a long list for a pre-seed, and it is best read as the money that gets ARC to a launchable product rather than the money that scales one. ARC X1 runs on an ARM-based architecture using Qualcomm technology, with a proprietary operating system called OWL OS built on AOSP, the open-source base of Android. Controller-first navigation, gaming-specific optimisation, and a deliberate attempt to feel like a games machine rather than an Android tablet with buttons. Native Android games are the easy case, because they already run on this architecture. Cloud gaming is easy too, since the device is mostly a screen and a controller in that scenario. The interesting claim is PC-game compatibility through ARC's own software stack, because PC games are built for x86 processors and this device runs on ARM. Bridging that gap means translation, and translation costs performance. How well ARC solves it is the difference between a device that plays a catalogue people already own and one that plays mobile games on a bigger screen. ARC says it has crossed 50,000 waitlist sign-ups and has collaborated with Qualcomm ahead of launch. The waitlist is the most concrete evidence of demand the company has, and it is also free to join. Sign-ups are intent, not orders, and the gap between the two is where hardw
