Deep tech is India’s field to dominate, if we have faith in local talent

India lacks deep tech capability while China is racing ahead, and it is the government’s fault for not making the right investments.

Last week, I gave a talk at the Network-18 Bharat Rising Summit about what exponentially advancing technologies are making possible—and how India has an opportunity to once again lead the world in science and innovation.

The next day, I participated in a panel discussion with Chandra Srikanth, Mohandas Pai, and Harsh Jain, in which the same tired narrative kept surfacing: that India lacks deep tech capability while China is racing ahead, and it is the government’s fault for not making the right investments. It seems that no one listened to me.

The truth about Chinese deep tech: It’s all about the government

Many Indians seem to believe that Chinese entrepreneurs are leading the charge in deep tech. This couldn’t be further from reality. China’s technological rise has been fueled by large-scale, state-sanctioned IP theft and massive government subsidies.

Its true edge lies in incremental innovation, bureaucratic favoritism, and enormous investments in technologies that advance its military and geopolitical ambitions.

Despite the buzz around companies like DeepSeek, China’s deep tech is not the product of visionary founders or scrappy inventors—it’s centrally planned, politically controlled, and executed top-down, not bottom-up.

Silicon Valley exists in a bubble, fearful of risks

The grand irony is that even in America, people complain that Silicon Valley only focuses on one technology fad at a time and doesn’t do enough deep tech. Everyone knows the Valley obsesses over the next mindless app, and the VCs operate in herd mode, wasting billions. Even when they see a real opportunity, they won’t fund radical, world-changing ideas—because their peers aren’t doing the same. And even if something gets funded, the deep tech talent either doesn’t exist—or is unaffordable to the startups that need it.

I already knew this, but I experienced it firsthand when I returned to Sand Hill Road—Silicon Valley’s temple of venture capital—hoping to engage the VCs I once considered friends. The moment I began describing a technology that required serious science and had the potential to help billions of people, their eyes glazed over. They weren’t interested in substance—only in what aligned with the latest hype cycle. They asked shallow questions, made smug comments, and tried to impress their partners by nitpicking a business plan they had no intention of understanding.

When I mentioned that I was considering doing R&D in India, they laughed. When I said I wanted to solve the problems of the poor, they rolled their eyes. They acted like it was a joke. That’s when I realized the truth: these weren’t visionaries. They were risk-averse gatekeepers, trapped in an echo chamber of arrogance, status signaling, and herd mentality.

When I decided to fund my company, Vionix Biosciences, myself and began recruiting the scientific, engineering, and medical talent needed to build it, I saw clearly what I’d suspected: the talent either didn’t exist or was locked away in obscure government labs or big industry silos.

The last ambitious project Silicon Valley backed in this space was Theranos—which raised $1.4 billion and collapsed in fraud. That failure traumatized the entire ecosystem. Since then, no one has dared to touch diagnostics at that scale. Instead of fixing what went wrong, Silicon Valley decided it was too risky to try again. No wonder they believe deep tech needs hundreds of millions in funding—the expertise is scattered, hidden, and prohibitively expensive. Often, it has to be relocated from forgotten corners of the U.S. or imported from places like India.

India’s limitless possibilities

So last year, I took a big gamble. I decided to build the most ambitious technology of my life—not in the U.S., but in India. I partnered with IIT Madras and AIIMS Delhi. And they delivered; India delivered. Together, we built something that the United States—with all its capital, military funding, and elite institutions—couldn’t. It proved Silicon Valley wrong.

We developed a compact, AI-powered diagnostic platform that analyzes biological and environmental samples in real time. It replaces systems like ICP-MS, LC-MS, and GC-MS—machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—with a device that costs a tiny fraction, delivers faster results, and is small enough to take into the field. Vionix Spectra uses non-thermal plasma to ionize samples and AI to decode their spectral signatures. What top scientists from the U.S. Department of Defense failed to build in Chile with years of effort was built in India in under 15 months, for less than $3 million.

That’s deep tech. And it proves India’s capability.

India’s got talent

What made this possible wasn’t just vision or urgency—it was talent. Building Vionix Spectra required expertise across a range of disciplines: electrical engineering, plasma physics, thermodynamics, applied mathematics, biomedical instrumentation, embedded systems, and signal processing. These are not skills you can easily assemble in Silicon Valley anymore. In the U.S., they’re buried inside government agencies or legacy industrial labs. But in India, this deep talent still exists. The foundational sciences are still taught, and India’s engineers are still eager to build. That’s a national advantage.

And then there’s data. Deep tech doesn’t operate in isolation anymore. Machine learning makes the hardware intelligent. But ML only works with massive volumes of clean, real-world data. India has it—in disease surveillance, epidemiology, biometric records, mobile health platforms, and public service delivery systems linked to Aadhaar and other digital infrastructure. Scale becomes a strategic advantage and when paired with deep engineering and science, the conditions for exponential innovation emerge.

What’s missing is entrepreneurship

The myth that India lacks the talent or infrastructure to lead in deep tech is just that: a myth. The real issue isn’t capability—it’s mindset. The current generations of Indian leaders grew up under the legacy of British colonization, conditioned to believe its people were inferior. Its tech industry still lives in the shadow of Silicon Valley, told it is a back office, not a lab, that it can implement but not invent, and that the real breakthroughs come from somewhere else.

This inferiority complex—and the colonial attitudes are the true barrier.

India is sitting on a deep tech goldmine. The IITs, IISc, and research institutions like BARC and its Institute for Plasma Research have already developed the building blocks of the future—and they are ready to license these to entrepreneurs. I’ve walked through the labs, spoken to the scientists, and seen the caliber of their work. It’s on par with anything happening at American universities or Fortune 500 R&D labs. The missing link isn’t science. It’s entrepreneurship—and awareness. The same gap that plagues the U.S. now haunts India: a disconnect between discovery and deployment.

No one is showing India’s startup founders how to build businesses around deep science. Worse, they’re not even aware of what’s possible—or available in India itself. They haven’t visited the local research institutes or talked to scientists.

Instead, India is rewarding the wrong things. Watch Shark Tank India and count how many pitches are for chutneys, protein bars, or skin creams. This isn’t innovation—it’s consumer packaging. In fact, Shark Tank India should be banned for the disservice it is doing to the next generation of entrepreneurs—encouraging vanity over value, imitation over invention. And yet, that’s what gets airtime, applause, and funding. While the world faces existential crises—climate collapse, health breakdowns, widening inequality—India’s startup ecosystem is still chasing convenience and cosmetics.

It is time to stop glorifying gimmicks and start funding breakthroughs.

India has a historic opportunity. Exponential technologies—AI, robotics, sensors, synthetic biology, clean energy—are converging. Innovation costs have dropped. Time-to-scale has shrunk. And unlike the West, India isn’t burdened with bloated, dysfunctional legacy systems—especially in sectors like healthcare—where vested interests, inefficiency, and bureaucracy block innovation. India can leapfrog directly into the future.

Before the panel, Mohandas Pai and I had a friendly disagreement. He believes the government must fund deep tech at scale. I agree India needs more investment—but not just from the state. The future will be built by bold entrepreneurs, backed by visionary VCs, and supported by a government that enables, not controls. Let the government clear the roadblocks Pai rightly called out. Let it co-invest with industry—not dictate, but empower. Let it support entrepreneurs who license frontier technologies from national labs and research universities. Selection should be based on capability and courage—not connections or media buzz. The government doesn’t need to build the rocket, it just needs to fuel the launchpad.

India’s startup ecosystem is maturing, the tools are here, the infrastructure is here, the research is here, the talent is here. And then, the costs are low and ambition is growing. Now is the time to shift the culture—from imitation to invention, from shallow to deep, from gimmicky to groundbreaking.

India doesn’t need to follow the West. It doesn’t need to be second. It has the chance to lead. But first, it needs to believe—and stop building stupid startups.