top of page
Our Community
Your front row seat to innovation - curated drops of content from the heart of the DeepTech scene.
Evolution's Unread Pharmacy: Why We Backed Venomics AI
Somewhere in the Western Ghats, a snake is hunting. When it strikes, it delivers a cocktail of molecules that evolution has been refining for millions of years, each one built to find a specific target in its prey and act on it almost instantly. Compare that with how drugs usually get found. Teams spend years, and a lot of money, screening molecules that were never designed to do anything inside a living body. Most of them don't. Venom is different. Every peptide in it has al
Sunil Cavale
4 min read
When Lithium Can’t: Storing Energy for Months, Not Hours
On the Siachen Glacier, at posts as high as 21,000 feet, the cold is not just weather. It is the enemy. Over four decades on the world's highest battlefield, more Indian soldiers have died there from the cold and the terrain than from anything the other side has done — better than seven in ten of all fatalities. The temperature falls to minus fifty; winds arrive at 160 kmph without warning; frostbite can begin in seconds. Everything that holds a soldier on that ice is energy.
Vishnu Rajeev
6 min read
Silicon Minds
Neuromorphic computing and India’s opportunity to leapfrog to the physical AI era Every time a large language model answers a query, it consumes roughly the same energy as charging a smartphone. Multiply that across billions of daily requests, and you have an industry sprinting toward a wall: AI’s insatiable compute demands are already straining power grids, inflating data centre costs, and making the economics of inference—never mind training—structurally unsustainable. The
Speciale Invest
4 min read
How the StarOps Acquisition Drives GalaxEye's Full-Stack Space Ambition
India's private spaceflight ecosystem is moving through a structural shift, and the pace is picking up. The sector's centre of gravity is moving from a landscape of component suppliers serving a government-anchored ISRO to a smaller set of globally competitive deep-tech companies building their own rockets, satellites and orbital infrastructure end to end. IN-SPACe's own numbers capture the scale of the ambition behind that shift: India's space economy stood at roughly $8.4 b
Speciale Invest
4 min read
Ultraviolette and the Rise of India's Sovereign Industrial Deep Tech
A few years ago, a made-in-India, high-performance, all-electric motorcycle competing on European roads — Bologna, home of Ducati; Berlin, HQ to BMW — would have sounded like a pitch deck fantasy. Ultraviolette has made it real. The company's July 2026 numbers mark a watershed: sales surged 406 percent year-on-year to a record 694 units, the highest month in its history. Set against India's ~12–15 million annual two-wheeler market, 694 units is still a rounding error — but th
Speciale Invest
3 min read
Defrastructure: How ePlane Is Turning India's Urban Chaos Into a Market Opportunity
The ePlane Company's unveiling of its full-scale e200X PT-01 prototype, staged inside a 60,000-square-foot facility at the IIT Madras Discovery Campus, is a milestone worth pausing on — not because prototypes are rare in aerospace, but because this one moves a category that has lived almost entirely in slide decks and subscale lab demonstrations into physical, weight-bearing reality. For Founder and CEO Professor Satya Chakravarthy and the engineers who built alongside him, t
Speciale Invest
4 min read
A True Confession About Indian Biotech
Where we think the science, the capital, and the country are actually going — and what we're betting on. This is Speciale's view, not the market's. Every year a number gets read out at a podium in Delhi and the room applauds. This time it was $195.3 billion — India's bioeconomy, up 18% in a single year, now around 4.8% of GDP, built on the backs of nearly 12,000 biotech startups. It is a genuinely large, genuinely good number. It is also, if we're being honest, the wrong plac
Ahammad Shibil
6 min read
Tripling down on our conviction in InspeCity in its INR 100Cr Pre-Series A Round
We're excited to be co-leading in InspeCity's INR 100Cr Pre-Series A round, tripling down on a company we first backed in 2023 and again in 2025. InspeCity is building India's first integrated stack for in-space servicing — propulsion, sensing, and robotics — the capabilities that let a satellite move, see, and act once it's already in orbit. Our conviction rested on a simple observation: as more satellites go up, someone will need to service, refuel, inspect, and eventually
Sunil Cavale
3 min read
Taking Heat: How DashamLabs Is Mastering the Economics of Insulation With Advanced Aerogel
Those who sold the picks and shovels to gold rush prospectors in California, some 175 years ago, often made more money than the prospectors themselves. In India's deep tech landscape today, the modern equivalent is a wave of entrepreneurs building the advanced materials, components and subsystems that Indian industry has historically had to import. In our own portfolio, DashamLabs, based in Haryana, is a prime example — and in the coming weeks, the company will commission Ind
Speciale Invest
3 min read
PODCAST
NEWSLETTER
REPORTS
Semiconductor Startup Landscape in India
The Indian semiconductor ecosystem is at an inflection point, with rapid activity in progress across almost all aspects of the value chain. Globally too, the semiconductor industry is buoyed by the growth in AI and AI infrastructure. As venture capital investors in India, we are excited about what this activity means for early-stage startups and how they grow and interface with a rapidly changing industry.
In this report, we dive into the factors propelling the sector forward - rising global demand, favourable geopolitical shifts, and strong policy backing through initiatives like the DLI, C2S, and PLI schemes.
Our goal is to offer investors, founders, and ecosystem enablers a realistic and hopeful view of how India is gearing up to lead in deeptech innovation. Over the past five years, we’ve seen more than $300M invested in Indian semicon startups, and the momentum is only building. We’ve observed a shift in founder profiles - from engineers returning from global design firms to professors productizing academic research - and it’s encouraging to see VCs becoming increasingly comfortable coming in early.
This report reflects not just data, but our experiences working closely with some of these incredible teams - teams that are creating real IP, solving hard tech problems, and building for global markets from Indian soil.To me, this isn’t just an emerging opportunity - it’s a defining moment. India is no longer just a service destination; we’re watching the rise of a product-first, IP-driven semiconductor ecosystem that’s still young but deeply promising.
This report was done in collaboration with Vishal Katariya of Ankur Capital was first presented at the Second Annual SemiX Summit at IIT-Bombay in November 2024
YOUTUBE
#18 Scaling sovereign compute: the journey of Morphing Machines and the future of reconfigurable ...
#17 Indian Silicon -Mindgrove’s founders on the journey to their first commercial product
#16 Ankit Jain at StepChange on his vision for climate intelligence for all
#16 Ankit Jain at StepChange on his vision for climate intelligence for all
bottom of page