Indian Startups: Watering the seeds for India to become world’s deeptech capital

Revolution in Deeptech Sector

The success stories of these startups exemplify the deeptech revolution that is brewing at the heart of India’s digital transformation. In approximately 31,000 technology startups that are operational, 3,200 of these leverage deeptech at the core of their IP. These startups are working on novel extensions and applications of deeptech, with around 500 companies categorized as 'Inventive Deeptech'. A substantial volume of intellectual property has been generated, highlighted by around 1,400 patents filed by these deeptech startups, with over 350 patents filed in India and the rest globally. Deeptech is gaining a strong foothold into the DNA of our startup ecosystem. This has led to a significant momentum in the deeptech space with increased interest from equity investors and VCs. In 2021, Indian deeptech startups raised $2.7 billion, with AI and Big Data & Analytics being the top technologies raising equity investments.

The deeptech sector is poised to contribute between $450 billion to $500 billion to India’s economy by 2025, showcasing its significant impact. This ecosystem will facilitate significant job creation, accelerate digital transformation, and provide leapfrogging opportunities for our country across several critical sectors. For India to ascend as a global leader in innovation, it is imperative to develop capabilities strategically yet swiftly throughout the deeptech value chain—from research to commercialization—in these frontier technologies.

Challenges for The Deeptech Sector

However, the focus on deeptech in India extends beyond just financial outcomes. While the government has earmarked a significant sum of Rs 1 lakh crore in the recent interim budget to stimulate private investment in emerging technologies, for the deeptech sector to thrive, collaboration is essential.

Despite its potential, the sector is characterized by its complexity and high entry barriers, necessitating patient capital, a robust intellectual property (IP) regime, and a longer timeframe for market entry.

1. Enabling regulations: rapid pace of innovation in Indian deeptech startups often outpaces existing regulatory frameworks, and a lack of understanding among regulatory bodies can significantly limit the development of new solutions. It is crucial for the government to mitigate these regulatory risks by fostering regulatory certainty across all deeptech sectors. Access to test labs, compute costs, cost of filing patents globally, lack of open data, cost of hardware certifications are key constraints faced by the startups and therefore require support from the Government.

2. Market Access: Given the nature of Deeptech solutions, access to market i.e., corporate clients are necessary for deeptech startups to prove the feasibility and scalability of their offerings and in many cases co-develop the product through iteration cycles working closely with anchor customers. There is an opportunity to provide market access to deeptech startups via dedicated programs to enable Enterprise Connects.

There is also a need to ease norms and streamline the process for public procurement to make it more accessible and efficient for startups. The success of public procurement should be used as a marketing tool to attract more startups to participate in public sector procurement opportunities.

3. Academia R&D connect: A focused effort to bring together academia, corporate, and start- ups into specific clusters will help accelerate commercialization of many groundbreaking deeptech research programs in our top tier research institutes that today may not be making that transition from the lab to the real world. We need to create programs that strongly incentivize the research community and enable them to either take their own steps to be entrepreneurs or partner with startups to license and evolve their technology further into real world products and services.

4. Access to talent: Developing world class competence in deeptech areas requires deep level of immersion and specialization in these areas and this calls for focused upskilling programs in several areas across our enterprises as well as educational institutions. We need to evolve our education system and curricula at technical institutes to allow more flexibility and options for exploration of the various deeptech areas as well as the ability to specialize more deeply, often with a significant component of early connect with the industry and developing their skills in real world settings along with the foundational knowledge they receive through their traditional classroom-based course design. The National Education Policy can look at evolving the breadth and depth of the various degree programs offered, the curriculum design and look at how we can develop the workforce for this deeptech led future.

As we forge further ahead into this brave new world full of possibilities, Deeptech will become increasingly integrated into the fabric of innovation. Areas such as AI, Quantum Computing, Space tech, next gen robotics and others will come together in interesting ways and be applied across every domain from education, entertainment, commerce, agriculture, industrial manufacturing, mobility, and several others. India, with its deep talent base and traditional strength of producing top notch STEM talent is well positioned to play a dominant role in this technology led societal transition process.

The writer is Chair of Nasscom DeepTech Council. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.