Three VCs on how they are changing India's deeptech landscape
Endiya Partners on the importance of celebrating small wins; Arali Ventures on spotting early opportunities; MFV Partners on enabling startups with proprietary tech

And everyone in the ecosystem needs to be patient and continue to believe, and make investments and celebrate the victories along the way, he says.
The partners see themselves as thematic investors, and “on average, for every dollar we’ve invested, our companies, cumulatively, have raised close to $30 from other investors", Andra says.
Eventually, some product startups from India will go global, but many more will go regional as well, he says. “I think the time has come," he says.
Unlike in software services, for example, and some other sectors, talent in deeptech comes at a premium, and the idea of “fail cheap, fail fast" isn’t so relevant for deeptech companies, Andra says. This is because there is a certain upfront cost necessary to building such technologies and products.
That said, with the changing landscape worldwide and in India, multiple factors are coming together—from geopolitical shifts, to growing local awareness about the importance of lab-to-market commercialisation—that will support the rise of some strong tech companies from India over the next decade, he says.Also read: Why Pi Ventures likes to be one of the first investors in a startup
Wingman, a software products company, got acquired fairly early. Think of their software as an AI whisperer into the ears of sales agents. CynLr is one of the most sophisticated robotics companies to come out of India so far, with their AI and computer vision guided camera for industrial robots.
In the broader tech landscape in India, the real inflection point will happen when Indian companies will start developing fundamental “infrastructure level" technologies, Raghavan says. This is something that applies to Indian deeptech companies as well. For example, a space propulsion engine developer in India would be making innovative tweaks based on an existing original invention that was probably developed in the US. A computer vision venture will likely use existing pieces of hardware and develop a sophisticated design to pull them together.
There’s tremendous opportunity there, but we need to go deeper, in parallel. Raghavan offers the software analogy: Traditionally we’ve been very good as a country in all things application software—today, a $250 billion industry, including IT services and global capability centres. “But anything that’s at a more infra level, anything that’s more at a tooling level is something that we don’t have a lot of experience in," he says. That’s something that he thinks will develop as a startup ecosystem in India over the next four or five years.
“Can we think of a Snowflake emerging from India in the next 10 years?" For example. “It’s a critical aspect. If you’re able to do that, the ability for you to become a large company is very easy."
First Published: Oct 30, 2023, 17:24
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