India Tech Report

Category: Conversations

Interviews with founders, investors, industry leaders and other stakeholders building India’s deep tech and climate tech ecosystems.

  • Sunil Cavale and Vishal Katariya on the evolving chip startup landscape in India

    Sunil Cavale and Vishal Katariya on the evolving chip startup landscape in India

    In today’s episode, I bring you a conversation with Sunil Cavale at Speciale Invest and Vishal Katariya at Ankur Capital, both VC firms well known as early-stage backers of deep tech startups in India.

    Vishal and Sunil discuss their recent report on the Semiconductor Startup Landscape in India.

    India’s chip industry has made significant strides from being only a location for the development centres of global companies, designing to foreign specifications.

    Today, a new cohort of founders — professors spinning out decades of research, veterans of Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, and second‑time chip entrepreneurs — is trying to build products, not just provide services. Their targets range from high‑volume microcontrollers for cameras and smart meters to AI accelerators for data centres and the edge.

    Venture capital is following. Seed rounds are giving way to briskly timed Series-A investments, some closing within 18 months of the seed funding and at two to ten times the earlier cheque sizes. Capital is also broadening beyond specialist funds: family offices, strategic corporates like Zoho and the venture arms of global chipmakers now want a role in the India semicon story.

    Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are pushing beyond fabless design into manufacturing‑adjacent niches such as metrology tools, lithography subsystems and low‑volume prototyping — hedging against the geopolitical fragility of a supply chain still concentrated in Taiwan and the Netherlands.

    Link to the report at Speciale Invest:
    https://www.specialeinvest.com/community?pgid=mdx2tvo7-e24d7063-961f-4de4-b405-ce9282527498
    Link to the report at Ankur Capital:
    https://www.ankurcapital.com/post/semiconductor-startup-landscape-in-india-2025-perspective

    This week’s conversation brings together two investors who have had a ringside view of these shifts. Sunil and Vishal have spent the past few years swapping notes on deals, founders, failures and successes. Out of those conversations that started during one fateful meeting at a McDonald’s in Ghatkopar, in Mumbai, came their Semiconductor Startup Landscape in India report, first presented at IIT Bombay’s SemiX conference.

    Rather than rehearse well-known talking points, they have tried to document what is actually happening on the ground: who the founders are, where the money originates, which verticals are getting crowded and where the genuine white spaces lie. In this episode, they explain why India’s chip moment may finally be real — and what it will take to sustain it.

  • Climake’s founders on their ‘most upbeat’ climate finance report yet on India

    Climake’s founders on their ‘most upbeat’ climate finance report yet on India

    In this episode, I’m joined by Simmi Sareen and Shravan Shankar, co-founders of Climake, a climate finance platform and advisory, to talk about their fifth annual report on the state of climate finance in India – 2025 edition.

    In 2024, equity capital deployed reached $9.4 billion, about double from the previous year, with public markets absorbing 60 percent of all funding. Simmi and Shravan also talk about some consequential shifts: such as the emergence of a public capital ecosystem that routes money to climate solutions that can be vital while not being attractive to venture capital investors.

    The two co-founders have formally tracked this evolution ever since they founded Climake in the middle of the Covid pandemic, and much longer in various capacities before that. Simmi brings to Climake two decades of mainstream finance experience, including at a global investment bank, and she’s previously built a climate-focused fintech and debt platform.

    Shravan has built his career across sustainability policy, innovation ecosystems, and climate entrepreneurship. Their annual State of Climate Finance reports are increasingly widely accepted in the industry as investor look at India-specific decisions.

    In this conversation they talk about what their fifth report reveals: a $2 trillion capital requirement through 2035, a substantive shift toward adaptation financing, and the expanding role of public markets in sectors like wastewater treatment and solar components that aren’t attractive from a VC’s perspective.

    The discussion spans emerging technologies from sustainable fuels and flow batteries to seaweed-based biochar solutions, the persistent gaps in growth-stage capital for asset-heavy climate enterprises, and how adaptation will reshape investment contours as it becomes increasingly urgent.

  • Neil Shah at Counterpoint on Panther Lake and Intel’s robotics play

    Neil Shah at Counterpoint on Panther Lake and Intel’s robotics play

    In today’s episode, Neil Shah, co-founder and vice president at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, gives us a quick take on Intel’s new Panther Lake processor and its potential use cases in robotics and physical AI.

    Intel’s new Panther Lake SoC marks a defining turn in the company’s roadmap toward robotics-ready edge computing. In this quick-take episode, Neil explains how the chip’s modular ‘chiplet’ design, delivering up to 180 trillion operations per second (TOPS), could make Intel a contender below Nvidia’s high-end robotics tier.

    He also weighs in on the ‘physical AI’ applications for robots that sense, analyze, and act locally. And is there an opportunity here for India’s fabless chip design startups? Stay on to hear Neil’s views on this.

    Neil Shah
    https://counterpointresearch.com/default.htm/opinion-leader/Shah?id=10

    Intel’s Panther Lake press release
    https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/intel-unveils-panther-lake-architecture-first-ai-pc-platform-built-on-18a

    More on Intel’s Physical AI software suite
    https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/Artificial-Intelligence-AI/Simplify-Physical-AI-Deployment-with-Intel-Robotics-AI-Suite/post/1719666

  • Ganapathy Subramaniam on Yali’s deep tech startup bets in India — Part 2

    Ganapathy Subramaniam on Yali’s deep tech startup bets in India — Part 2

    In today’s episode, Ganapathy ‘Gani’ Subramaniam, founding managing partner of Yali Capital, a deep-tech VC firm in Bengaluru, joins me for Part 2 of our discussion on the firm’s debut deep-tech fund.

    In this conversation, we picked up with Yali’s investment in Perceptyne, a company developing humanoid robotics for manufacturing and eventually physical AI applications. Gani then speaks about the semiconductor industry in India, identifying opportunities for both globally competitive and domestically focused fabless chip design companies, with the C2i Semiconductors in the first category.

    And if you stay on, you’ll get Gani’s insights into the importance of diverse co-founding teams, global thinking, and why storytelling holds the key to funding – something that India’s deep tech founders need to master.

  • Bhaktha Keshavachar on Chara’s new $6 million funding

    Bhaktha Keshavachar on Chara’s new $6 million funding

    In this episode, Bhaktha Ram Keshavachar, founder and CEO of Chara Technologies, talks about a new funding round at his startup.

    Chara, based in Bengaluru, specializes in building rare earth-free motors and matching controllers. That China, which has a near monopoly on the supply chain of rare earth minerals, has intensified its restrictions on their exports, is something of a tailwind for ventures like Chara.

    In this briefing, Bhaktha covers the company’s Series A funding of Rs. 52 crore, or about $6 million, led by Arkam Ventures, with participation from Exfinity Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital, and IIMA Ventures, and how the money will help.

    Plans include, ramping up sales, further investment in new technology and products, and a significant increase in motor production capacity.

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

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

    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.