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Your front row seat to innovation - curated drops of content from the heart of the DeepTech scene.
Right-Pricing Climate Risk: StepChange's Profitable Playbook for the Global South
From financing nations to funding homes, banks and financial institutions quietly shape the future more than almost any other industry. Climate change is the latest test of that power — and today, most institutions still lack the tools to price the risk accurately. Giving them timely, reliable decision-making tools is a massive opportunity, and a hard one, because the underlying data is patchy at best. StepChange, a company in our portfolio, sits at the intersection of climat
Speciale Invest
3 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
India's Path to Energy Abundance: Why Thorium-Based SMRs Are the Bet Worth Making
India's growth story has a quiet dependency problem. Every semiconductor fab, every data center racing to serve AI workloads, every gigafactory and desalination plant we want to build over the next two decades needs one thing that solar and wind, for all their virtues, cannot reliably provide: firm, 24x7 baseload power. Renewables solve the emissions problem. They don't solve the dispatchability problem. And a $7-trillion-economy ambition cannot be built on intermittent elect
Vishesh Rajaram
5 min read
Data Security in the Post-Quantum Era: How QNu Labs Is Putting Indian Deep-Tech on the World Map
Quantum-safe communication remains one of the hardest verticals in deep tech to commercialise anywhere in the world — India included. Most ventures in this category are still working through lab-stage physics. A small cohort, however, is now making the harder transition: from R&D roadmap to fielded, revenue-generating product, taking made-in-India quantum technology into the global arena. Bengaluru-based QNu Labs is one of them — and it is making that transition visible. As c
Speciale Invest
5 min read
Sovereign Silicon: Mindgrove and the Arrival of India's Product IP Era
India's chip design industry has spent three decades exporting talent, not products: engineers who design silicon for Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia while the domestic market runs on imported chips. In June this year , that pattern broke a little further. Mindgrove Technologies, a Speciale portfolio company, has signed a commercial deployment agreement with Prama India to embed its indigenously designed Vision SoC into Prama's CCTV and video security product line. It is a small
Speciale Invest
4 min read
Rocket on Demand: AgniKul and the Small-Lift Revolution
In May this year, two years after its historic tech demonstrator flight — the first rocket in the world powered by a single-piece 3D-printed engine — AgniKul Cosmos delivered its next major proof point. On May 19, the Chennai-based launch vehicle company successfully completed a simultaneous hot-fire test of its four Agnilet engine semi-cryogenic cluster: eight pumps, eight motors, synchronized by independent algorithms, operating as a single coherent propulsion unit. This wa
Speciale Invest
4 min read
Atmospheric Arbitrage: How Uravu Labs Is Turning Air Into Water — and Water Into a Global Business
When Uravu Labs was selected for Abu Dhabi's Hub71 Cohort 18, the headline read like a geographic milestone. But for those of us who backed this Bengaluru-based deep-tech startup from its earliest days, the news carried a more significant signal: a technology developed, stress-tested, and commercialised in India is now being sought out by one of the world's most water-stressed and capital-intensive regions. This is not simply expansion. It is validation — of a fundamental tec
Speciale Invest
5 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
#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
#15 How Newtrace’s founders are tackling the green hydrogen challenge one component at a time
#14 Beyond chemistry: e-TRNL’s founders on their next-gen battery architecture
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