By Ajay Modi, Director at Piper Serica
The biggest venture opportunities are not always found in markets that are already large. They often emerge in markets that are still being built where few companies have participated, the problems remain difficult and the eventual shape of the industry is still unclear. That is precisely what makes deep technology interesting. When years of R&D begin converting into working products, commercial pilots and early demand, technologies that once appeared too difficult to finance can begin to look like some of the most defensible businesses of the next decade.
India is increasingly entering that phase. For years, businesses built around semiconductors, advanced electronics, space systems, robotics and other complex technologies faced a familiar problem: significant R&D requirements, long product-development cycles and uncertain commercial adoption. These characteristics made them difficult to finance through conventional capital. But the equation is changing as technology matures, domestic demand deepens, policy support expands and strategic customers increasingly seek indigenous capabilities.
The opportunity for venture capital lies in identifying this transition early.
The first layer of change is de-risking the technology itself. Many of today’s deeptech founders are not starting from an idea on a presentation slide. They have spent years developing proprietary technologies, building prototypes and demonstrating them through pilots or early customer deployments. Once a technology moves from laboratory research towards a validated product, the nature of the risk changes. The question shifts from can this be built? Can this be scaled commercially?
That is an important transition for growth-oriented capital.
The second layer is the emergence of visible demand signals. Global supply-chain realignments, the need for domestic technological capabilities and increasing demand from industrial and strategic customers are creating markets that were less visible a decade ago. India’s electronics production, for instance, has risen from about ₹1.9 lakh crore in 2014-15 to around ₹12 lakh crore in 2024-25. Under the Semicon India Programme, 10 semiconductor projects involving envisaged investments of about ₹1.64 lakh crore have also been approved.
These numbers matter not simply because they indicate scale, but because they point towards an expanding ecosystem around which new companies can build.
The third layer is patient capital. Deep technology cannot always be evaluated using the same timelines as an asset-light software company. Product development, certification, manufacturing, customer validation and eventual scale-up can take several years. Capital therefore has to be aligned with milestones rather than just near-term revenue.
Policy is increasingly recognising this financing gap. The government’s ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme is designed to support high-risk, high-impact technologies through longer-tenor financing and equity, including support for deep-tech funds. The space ecosystem is seeing a similar institutional push, with the ₹1,000+ crore Antariksh Venture Capital Fund being operationalised for space startups.
This creates an increasingly interesting capital stack: public programmes and strategic customers can help reduce technology and market risk; founders bring years of technical development; and venture capital can provide the growth capital required to move from technology development to commercial scale.
That is where the investment opportunity becomes particularly compelling. The biggest venture outcomes may not necessarily come from the businesses that are easiest to understand today. They could come from companies solving problems that were previously considered too technically difficult, too capital-intensive or too early for institutional capital but where years of R&D have now produced measurable milestones.
The investment discipline, therefore, is not to fund complexity for its own sake. It is to identify technological complexity that can translate into defensibility, a real market and a credible path to scale.
India’s startup story began by proving that the country could build software and digital businesses at global scale. The next phase could be about proving that Indian companies can build the underlying technologies that power strategic industries.
For venture capital, the hardest technologies may consequently become some of the most interesting opportunities not because they carry less risk, but because the ecosystem is increasingly learning how to measure, de-risk and finance that risk across the journey from invention to enterprise.