Speciale Invest has gone from one investment in an electric motorcycle company to an electric plane company to satellite and rocket makers to renewable water and probably, very soon, a hydrogen technologies startup
(From left) Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao
Multiple venture capital (VC) firms are consciously funding startups that are addressing climate change concerns, and devising solutions for a clean and sustainable world. Read about them here.
Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao started Speciale Invest in 2017, bringing their complimentary experiences of VC, tech and startups to back entrepreneurs trying to solve hard engineering problems, “building technologies of tomorrow”, out of India.
Early in his career, Rajaram had visited Israel and the entrepreneurs and the tech he saw coming out of that country left a lasting impression on him. “More specifically, I kept thinking why can’t folks in India build some of these technologies,” he says.
Typically, the partners invest in pre-seed and seed-stage startups in deep science and enterprise technologies, offering cheques ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. With each new investment, they learnt something that helped them foray into a new segment of science and engineering. They’ve gone from one investment in an electric motorcycle company to an electric plane company to satellite and rocket makers to renewable water and probably, very soon, a hydrogen technologies startup.
(This story appears in the 03 June, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)