Ganapathy Subramaniam on Yali’s deep tech startup bets in India — Part 1

In-depth conversations with founders, investors, industry leaders, and other stakeholders building India’s deep tech and climate tech ecosystems.

In today’s episode, Ganapathy ‘Gani’ Subramaniam, founding managing partner of Yali Capital, a deep-tech VC firm in Bengaluru, joins me to discuss the firm’s debut fund, which had its final close about two months ago.

At Rs. 893 crore (about $104 million), this is perhaps India’s biggest deep-tech-only fund currently, backed by Marquee names such as Qualcomm, India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Infosys Innovation Fund, The Tata Group, and Intel Corp. CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who’s an advisor to the fund.

Gani’s career traces a journey from semiconductor design engineer, starting with Texas Instruments, to building his own block-level chip design startup Cosmic Circuits, which was later acquired by Cadence Design Systems, to VC investor through several years at Celesta Capital, a well-known multinational deep tech fund, before starting Yali.

As many of you would know, Yali’s founding partners, Gani and Mathew Cyriac, partner Karthikeyan Madathil and CFO Sunil S Patil bring formidable industry experience to their endeavour – collectively over a century of experience in semiconductors, aerospace and of course VC and private equity.

In this conversation, we cover Yali’s approach to deep tech in India, which includes investing not only in early stage startups but also, selectively, some advanced late stage ventures. Gani also gives us a quick overview of the investments they’ve already made.

The conversation also offers some context on how Indian deep tech startups are navigating challenges of scale and commercialization, and why Yali Capital is betting on the next decade of deep tech innovation.