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Category: Conversations
Interviews with founders, investors, industry leaders and other stakeholders building India’s deep tech and climate tech ecosystems.
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Coming up: Intel veteran Ramamurthy Sivakumar on HrdWyr’s roadmap for AI-native chips from India
HrdWyr, a Bengaluru-based semiconductor startup, recently secured $13 million in Series A funding led by Ideaspring Capital to advance its AI-native chip technology. The company specializes in System-on-Chip (AISoC) designs tailored for edge computing and real-world applications like electric vehicles and industrial equipment.
A significant milestone for the firm is its partnership with boAt and Tata Electronics to produce the Indus 1011, a locally designed chip for audio wearables.
Companies such as HrdWyr are getting funded in the time of a broader national push for semiconductor self-reliance, supported by significant government investment and rising market demand.
Yesterday, I spoke to Co-founder and CEO Ramamurthy Sivakumar, an Intel Corp veteran, on HrdWyr’s plans. Catch the full interview right here on Tuesday, June 16th. Here’s a 90 second preview, with Siva talking about the massive influence of AI.
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Deep tech: Ideaspring Capital’s founders on the circle of life and other investing lessons (Part 2)
In today’s episode, I bring you Part 2 of an interview with Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO, at Ideaspring Capital in Bengaluru.
In this episode, we pick up the conversation with a brief discussion on what the two VC investors are seeing when it comes to the growth of translational research in India — and I want to add that this was in the broader sense of any movement from scientific lab to commercial product, and not just in the medical field, where the term originated.
And if you stick around you’ll hear Naganand and Suri discuss their views on how early-stage investing in deep tech is changing, can such investors make meaningful investments in highly capital intensive sectors such as robotics, nuclear fusion and quantum computing hardware, in India, getting something not quite right but moving on, and whether AI is changing their work as well, and in what ways.
And as promised in Part 1, we take a quick look at what might represent a ‘Flipkart moment’ in India’s deep tech sector, and the evolution of Ideaspring itself from Fund 1 to Fund 4.
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Ideaspring Capital’s founders on their entrepreneurs turned VCs life | Preview
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. -
Decarbonising rice: Mitti Labs founders on their plan for future of sustainable farming
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.
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Coming up: Mitti Labs founders on vision for sustainable rice farming
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.
