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Your front row seat to innovation - curated drops of content from the heart of the DeepTech scene.


Indian Electric Grid – from Passive Infra to Programmable Nodes
Why Solid-State Transformers Are the Technology India Cannot Afford to Miss One of the most underappreciated engineering achievements in India’s modern history is the unification of its electric grid Five regional grids — Northern, Eastern, Western, North-Eastern, and Southern — historically operated in isolation, each with different frequency profiles and zero power exchange. Unifying them took decades. The final milestone came in 2013 with the 765 kV Solapur–Raichur line li

Speciale Invest
5 min read


Beyond the membrane: How India's green hydrogen ecosystem is maturing
India's green hydrogen sector has made significant progress, with commissioned plants, operational full-scale factories, and competitive price discovery mechanisms that bring new projects within sight of final investment decisions. In our previous post on this subject, we sought to draw your attention towards the innovative membrane-less electrolyser technologies being developed and commercialised by Newtrace, one of our own portfolio ventures. In this post, we offer our

Speciale Invest
3 min read


Renewables realism: BESS and India's path to round-the-clock supply
India's renewable energy sector added a record 44.5 GW of capacity in 2025, pushing total non-fossil fuel capacity past 253 GW. Yet these figures mask a fundamental constraint: when the sun sets and the wind dies down, the power disappears. Energy storage remains the missing link between ambitious capacity targets and a reliable electricity supply. Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are no longer a distant aspiration — India expects installations to surge nearly tenfo

Speciale Invest
3 min read


India's Biotech Inflection Point: A Pre-Seed Investor's Perspective
India's bioeconomy just crossed $165 billion. A decade ago, it was $10 billion. That's a 16x expansion in ten years, and we're only getting started. At Speciale, we've been investing in Indian deep science since 2018 — across three funds, 35+ companies, and sectors ranging from space and semiconductors to defence and AI. Over the past two years, biotech has become one of the most exciting areas in our portfolio. It is also one of the most misunderstood by the broader investor

Ahammad Shibil
9 min read


Leapfrogging into India’s life sciences future: why we continue to back Peptris
India stands at an inflection point in artificial intelligence and biotechnology. While the country has long been a global leader in generic manufacturing, services, and software, the next frontier is original drug discovery. AI gives us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leapfrog traditional biotech timelines and costs, and build global life sciences companies from India. This isn’t just a market opportunity. It’s a national imperative. If India is serious about becoming

Vishnu Rajeev
3 min read


Our follow‑on investment in e-TRNL Energy — continued conviction in the team
We’re thrilled to share that we are participating in the INR 27.4Cr Seed Round of e-TRNL Energy, a company rethinking cell architecture with a manufacturing-first mindset. When we first invested in the company in late 2022, our conviction was rooted in one belief: The future of batteries will not just be determined by chemistry breakthroughs — it will be shaped by manufacturing breakthroughs. That conviction has only strengthened. Co-founders of e-TRNL Energy: (L) Uttam Sen,

Sunil Cavale
3 min read


Looking back at 2025: how our AI led software startups evolved
India's deep tech landscape is witnessing a quiet but meaningful evolution in artificial intelligence-led software, with private startups demonstrating that AI adoption need not be revolutionary to be valuable. Rather than claiming to transform entire industries overnight, a new generation of entrepreneurs is building practical tools that address specific operational challenges across verticals—from data automation to customer on-boarding, privacy protection to cross-border

Speciale Invest
3 min read


Leading India's charge in AI-driven drug discovery – the Peptris story
Drug discovery is among the areas that scientists and global pharmaceutical companies alike are excited about, when it comes to the hope that artificial intelligence is going to be transformative. AI holds out the promise of not only slashing the time and cost of developing a new molecule from lab to pharmacy to patients, but also helping innovators tap advanced genomics, proteomics and metabolomics data to make the dream of personalised medicine a reality. For India, a c

Speciale Invest
4 min read


Software-defined industrial automation: global opportunities and India's emerging role
Executive Summary The global manufacturing landscape sits at a critical juncture. While companies worldwide invest some $34 billion annually in industrial robotics, with growth projected at 13.8 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2034, reality on factory floors lags expectations. Approximately 72 percent of manufacturing tasks globally still require human hands, and even advanced automotive plants automate less than 10 percent of operations. This gap exist

Speciale Invest
14 min read
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Semiconductor Startup Landscape in India - An Investor's Perspective (2025)
Over the past few years, India’s semiconductor story has quietly — and confidently — taken shape. What began as a handful of research-led ventures has evolved into a movement of deep-tech founders building across chip design, tooling, and manufacturing. The conversation today is no longer if India can build in semiconductors, but how fast and how deep this ecosystem can scale.
At Speciale Invest, we have strong conviction in the Indian semiconductor ecosystem as noted by our investments in Mindgrove Technologies (2023) and Morphing Machines (2024). Building on the learnings from these investments and our larger observations from the ecosystem, we’ve put together our latest report — “Semiconductor Startup Landscape in India (2025)”, first presented along with Vishal Katariya of Ankur Capital, at the 3rd Annual SemiX Summit at IIT Bombay in September 2025. The report reflects how founders, investors, corporates, and policymakers are collectively shaping India’s semiconductor future — and the signals that point to a rapidly maturing innovation ecosystem.
The groundwork being laid today — across research labs, startups, and industry partnerships — will define India’s place in the global semiconductor value chain over the next decade.
The opportunity ahead is vast, and India is well-positioned to be a meaningful player in the global semiconductor value chain.
YOUTUBE

Factories of the Future: Brewing Biology, Not Burning Oil

From Atoms to Impact: Engineering the Materials of Tomorrow

#11 Code to Clinic: Peptris and the Future of AI-driven Drug Discovery from India

Beyond Code: Teaching Machines to Engineer
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