Beyond Software: Why UST is betting big on engineering, semiconductors, and India
UST’s Gilroy Mathew tell us why 2026 is a year of convergence. And why India’s best bet is to build the ecosystem, not just the plant.
4 Min Read
The trajectory of any institution is inseparable from the people who build it. Gilroy Mathew has spent twenty-seven years at UST, a span that mirrors the full arc of India’s IT story and now reaches into an era neither he nor the company he serves could have imagined at the outset.
Speaking to Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor, CNBC-TV18, on the fourteenth edition of CNBC-TV18 and Sify present Voices from the Valley, a special presentation as part of Young Turks, the world’s longest-running show on startups and entrepreneurship, the COO offered a portrait not merely of his own career but of a company, and a country, in purposeful motion.
UST was started on the same day in 1999 in Aliso Viejo, California, and in Thiruvananthapuram, a symmetry that captured the ambition of one of its key architects, the venerable G.A. Menon, to fold Kerala’s intellectual capital into the global technology economy.
Gilroy Mathew, then a young graduate with a retail background, joined when UST’s first customer proved to be a leading retailer. He later helmed UST’s foray into semiconductor engineering, a practice seeded seventeen years ago in a Bengaluru R&D laboratory that now defines the company’s identity.
It seems like a prescient bet, since chips, rather than the AI applications built atop them, are likely to determine the next technology era. The most telling illustration is the return of the CPU. Written off in the GPU-dominated cloud era, the processor is back.
“CPUs are coming back because of Ambient Intelligence. That’s a huge shift,” Gilroy Mathew tells Shereen Bhan, alluding to a world where AI is embedded into every physical system. The orchestration layer that this agentic AI requires will run on CPUs.
The Ecosystem Advantage
India’s semiconductor opportunity is framed against this global backdrop. UST’s answer is the ₹3,330-crore Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) facility at Sanand, Gujarat, developed with Kaynes Technology, inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi in early 2026. OSAT covers the testing and packaging of semiconductor chips that follow fabrication.
With Fabrication Plants still years away, packaging provides a viable entry point for India into the semiconductor value chain. Phase one, with eleven production lines across a 46-acre site, is already shipping. Phase two, targeting advanced packaging nodes, is planned for 2028.
Ecosystem, Gilroy Mathew insists, matters more than any single plant. Cost competitiveness and talent depth are nurtured within industrial clusters. Gilroy Mathew reports that UST is in active dialogue with companies from the United States, Europe, and Taiwan to deepen India’s semiconductor orbit, while investing in a design house for Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) semiconductor chips and custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) capability in India. A critical gap remains. “The shortfall for design resources is very, very high,” Gilroy Mathew says.
The Age Of Convergence
The automotive dimension illustrates a parallel convergence. The modern vehicle is software running on wheels. In December 2025, UST acquired a majority stake in Italdesign, the Turin-based design and engineering firm founded by Giorgetto Giugiaro and responsible for the Volkswagen Golf, among several other iconic designs.
Together, they aim to become providers of comprehensive integrated services, from hardware design to software development, for a new era of digitally-enabled vehicles. Additionally, a smart factory platform UST built for European manufacturers is also migrating to India, where a connected-vehicle solution already links 250,000 trucks, correlating eighty telematic parameters via AI.
Underpinning everything is a revenue ambition commensurate with the strategic scope. Gilroy Mathew envisions a platform-based solution selling driving the company’s growth through to 2030. Engineering, he argues, will not be commoditised the way software will.
The company’s seventeen-year bet on semiconductor engineering, placed well before the current frenzy, positions it to capture value across the full stack as edge compute alone approaches half a trillion dollars in the next three years. In 2026, Gilroy Mathew’s twenty-seventh year at UST, and the twenty-fourth year of Young Turks, the man and the moment have found each other in exactly the right season.
Speaking to Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor, CNBC-TV18, on the fourteenth edition of CNBC-TV18 and Sify present Voices from the Valley, a special presentation as part of Young Turks, the world’s longest-running show on startups and entrepreneurship, the COO offered a portrait not merely of his own career but of a company, and a country, in purposeful motion.
The Long Bet
UST was started on the same day in 1999 in Aliso Viejo, California, and in Thiruvananthapuram, a symmetry that captured the ambition of one of its key architects, the venerable G.A. Menon, to fold Kerala’s intellectual capital into the global technology economy.
Gilroy Mathew, then a young graduate with a retail background, joined when UST’s first customer proved to be a leading retailer. He later helmed UST’s foray into semiconductor engineering, a practice seeded seventeen years ago in a Bengaluru R&D laboratory that now defines the company’s identity.
It seems like a prescient bet, since chips, rather than the AI applications built atop them, are likely to determine the next technology era. The most telling illustration is the return of the CPU. Written off in the GPU-dominated cloud era, the processor is back.
“CPUs are coming back because of Ambient Intelligence. That’s a huge shift,” Gilroy Mathew tells Shereen Bhan, alluding to a world where AI is embedded into every physical system. The orchestration layer that this agentic AI requires will run on CPUs.
The Ecosystem Advantage
India’s semiconductor opportunity is framed against this global backdrop. UST’s answer is the ₹3,330-crore Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) facility at Sanand, Gujarat, developed with Kaynes Technology, inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi in early 2026. OSAT covers the testing and packaging of semiconductor chips that follow fabrication.
With Fabrication Plants still years away, packaging provides a viable entry point for India into the semiconductor value chain. Phase one, with eleven production lines across a 46-acre site, is already shipping. Phase two, targeting advanced packaging nodes, is planned for 2028.
Ecosystem, Gilroy Mathew insists, matters more than any single plant. Cost competitiveness and talent depth are nurtured within industrial clusters. Gilroy Mathew reports that UST is in active dialogue with companies from the United States, Europe, and Taiwan to deepen India’s semiconductor orbit, while investing in a design house for Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) semiconductor chips and custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) capability in India. A critical gap remains. “The shortfall for design resources is very, very high,” Gilroy Mathew says.
The Age Of Convergence
The automotive dimension illustrates a parallel convergence. The modern vehicle is software running on wheels. In December 2025, UST acquired a majority stake in Italdesign, the Turin-based design and engineering firm founded by Giorgetto Giugiaro and responsible for the Volkswagen Golf, among several other iconic designs.
Together, they aim to become providers of comprehensive integrated services, from hardware design to software development, for a new era of digitally-enabled vehicles. Additionally, a smart factory platform UST built for European manufacturers is also migrating to India, where a connected-vehicle solution already links 250,000 trucks, correlating eighty telematic parameters via AI.
Underpinning everything is a revenue ambition commensurate with the strategic scope. Gilroy Mathew envisions a platform-based solution selling driving the company’s growth through to 2030. Engineering, he argues, will not be commoditised the way software will.
The company’s seventeen-year bet on semiconductor engineering, placed well before the current frenzy, positions it to capture value across the full stack as edge compute alone approaches half a trillion dollars in the next three years. In 2026, Gilroy Mathew’s twenty-seventh year at UST, and the twenty-fourth year of Young Turks, the man and the moment have found each other in exactly the right season.
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