Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO at Ideaspring Capital, a well known deep tech VC firm in Bengaluru, sat down with me recently for an interview, which I’m publishing in two parts.
Catch Part 2, the concluding part, tomorrow, in which they talk about the raise-invest-grow-exit imperative of venture investing, and what that means for investing in deep tech startups in India. What’s happening in India’s top science and engineering schools when it comes to the lab-to-market journey? How is AI changing VC in deep tech and the ‘Flipkart moment’ of deep tech in India.
In today’s episode, on the occasion of World Environment Day, I bring you a conversation with Devdut Dalal (Dev), Xavier Laguarta Soler (Xavi) and Nathan Torbick (Nate), founders of Mitti Labs.
Rice is a nutritional staple for nearly half the human population. Its cultivation is also a formidable contributor to global warming, accounting for 10-12 percent of all methane emissions from human activity. And Methane is 80-86 times more potent than CO2 in warming the planet over a 20-year timeframe, and about 28 times over a century.
Growing rice also takes up 40 percent of the world’s freshwater resources. By drowning their fields to suppress weeds, farmers have inadvertently cultivated methanogenic microbes that release this ‘super pollutant.’ At Mitti Labs, Harvard Business School alumni Dev and Xavi have teamed up with Nate, a distinguished scientist who’s worked NASA and JaXA, to build a “full-stack” remedy.
They started work in India first some three years ago, persuading farmers to try out a technique known as Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) that entails periodically drain their fields, interrupting the anaerobic feast of methane-producing bacteria.
This is a known practice developed at the International Rice Research Institute. What the entrepreneurs at Mitti Labs are doing, however, is to plug in an innovative digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) platform. Using tools including satellite data and digital twins of the farms they aim to convert the methane reductions from AWD to equivalent carbon credits.
The plan at this venture, which is backed by the VC investor Lightspeed, is to become a vertically integrated carbon project developer providing farmers with free tools and a share of the revenue from the sale of the carbon credits.
Dev, Xavi and Nate, and their 100-plus team are already working with some 70,000 farmers in India, through partnerships with various NGOs and other such grassroots organisations that work closely with the farmers.
Their long-term success hinges on mobilising a substantial share of some 150 million smallholder rice growers who have farmed the same way for generations.
Rice is one of our biggest staples, here in India, but the way our farmers grow it is becoming increasingly unsustainable, as it contributes to depleting our water tables to dangerous levels.
Rice cultivation is also responsible for 10-12 percent of all methane released into the atmosphere from human activity — a gas that is 80-86 more potent than CO2 in warming the planet over a 20-year period.
Devdut Dalal, Xavier Laguarta Soler and Nathan Torbick, founders of Mitti Labs, have a plan to change this, at scale. And they’re already persuading some 70,000 rice farmers in India to try out their science-backed methods.
In the process, they also want to translate the reduced methane emissions to equivalent carbon credits, so that the farmers benefit from a share of the money from the sale of those credits.
Catch the full conversation on Friday, June 5, World Environment Day, right here or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a quick preview, with Nate giving us a sense of the potential for methane reduction and the water savings.
Today is the first day of the second year of this podcast. And in today’s episode of Conversations, I’m really happy to bring you Part 1 of an interview with Naganand Doreswamy, managing partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO, at Ideaspring Capital.
They are among those few VC investors in India who were backing deep tech startups long before the government’s massive research and development and innovation fund prompted everyone to want to grab a share of the pie.
This was a rich conversation for me to record, with plenty of plain speak without jargon that’s characteristic of these two VCs. We jumped right in, with Ideaspring’s latest investment, the $13 million Series A round that they led at the semiconductor company HrdWyr, how that reflects their views on deep tech investing today in India, what the RDIF has done and challenges that remain.
I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I did recording it.
Catch the second half of this conversation on Tuesday next week, where we talk about what might represent the ‘Flipkart moment’ of India’s deep tech sector, and Ideaspring’s next fund.
One could think of ‘Mitti’ — the Hindi word for soil — as representing the grounded foundation of a cooler future. And for us in India while rice that grows in our soil is a daily staple, its traditional cultivation is a hidden climate hazard. Rice cultivation worldwide is responsible for 10-12 percent of human-caused methane emissions. It also consumes staggering amounts of water.
Coming up next on Conversations at India Tech Report, Devdut Dalal (Dev), Xavier Laguarta Soler (Xavi), and Nathan Torbick (Nate), co-founders of Mitti Labs talk about how they are turning rice farming into a powerful vehicle for climate action – specifically targeting methane emissions from rice fields.
Since launching in late 2023, this “full stack” climate-tech startup has scaled from an idea that Harvard alumni Dev and Xavi had to a VC-funded startup (investors include Lightspeed) touching some 70,000 small-holder farmers in India today. Mitti Labs is helping the farmers change how they water their rice crops in a manner that reduces methane emissions, cuts water use and even makes the crops hardier, the entrepreneurs say.
Nate, a distinguished scientist, adds the science and tech experience, helping Mitti Labs tap satellite remote sensing and data analytics to build a digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) system, to track methane reductions at the field level. By converting these environmental wins into high-quality carbon credits, Mitti Labs aims to provide direct financial incentives and free advisory services to the farmers.
Catch the episode on June 5, World Environment Day, right here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a preview with Xavi and Dev laying out their basic thesis.
Welcome to this bonus episode in which I’m following up with a quick interview with Ravi Kulkarni, founder and COO of Moonrider, an electric tractor venture in Bengaluru. In the previous episode, I brought you a detailed sit-down conversation with Anoop Srikantaswamy, Ravi’s fellow founder and CEO.
Ravi is also a mechanical engineer by training, with a career spanning auto industry giants such as Tata Motors and Volvo. In this conversation, Ravi reflected on his innate drive to listen to the environment and solve real-world problems.
Before joining forces with Anoop, Ravi co-founded an electric three-wheeler venture, and he brings that vital execution experience to Moonrider’s mission to build tractors for the world.
In this episode, Ravi gives us a simple description of how Moonrider’s proprietary refrigerated battery packs work, maintaining cell temperatures low enough to ensure that high-torque electric tractors can handle the harshest field conditions while aiming for price parity with diesel.
He also touches upon topics such as selling tractors to small-holder farmers in India on the one hand to the potential for global collaborations on the other, and the critical importance of finding the right partner if an entrepreneur wants to go from idea to successful business.
