India Tech Report

In this episode, I’m are joined by Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a doyen among India’s champions of technology-led innovation for the masses, to discuss his latest moonshot venture: the ITEL Foundation (Immersive Technology and Entrepreneurship Labs).   After decades of bridging academia and industry at the IIT Madras Research Park, over the last two years, Professor Jhunjhunwala has been chairing...

Earlier this week, Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, who built the IIT Madras Research Park, among many other things, turned 73. The architect of India's technology-led affordable innovation is already steeped in his next set of moonshots, whose scope and ambition is Bharat-scale. And earlier this month, Roots and Wings, his authorised biography, was also released, a required-read for anyone intereste...

In my recent conversation with Vinod Shankar, founding partner at Java Capital, we discussed his note on how India could unlock a massive pool of capital and invest a trillion dollars in deep tech startups. Here's a viewpoint on one of the topics, how corporate R&D and M&A play an important role in the growth of deep tech startups in the advanced economies. And how that's been missing in I...

In today’s episode of Conversations, I’m joined by Vinod Shankar, co-founder of Java Capital, a venture capital firm that has carved a unique niche by focusing on deep tech and climate technology. Vinod’s journey is as specialized as his investments, moving from writing assembly code for mobile processors to leading a fund that backs moonshots in aerospace, silicon photonics, and advanced manufact...

Coming up in the next episode of Conversations at India Tech Report, Vinod Shankar, founding managing partner at Java Capital, discusses a note he wrote recently, calling on India's ultra rich to back deep innovation in the country with just 10 percent of their money. They can afford this, and he does so with his own money, Vinod says. The result of this collective effort, if it happens, could be...

In today’s episode, Ramamurthy Sivakumar, co-founder and CEO at HrdWyr, a semiconductor design startup in Bengaluru, talks about the company’s plans after recently raising $13 million in Series A funding, in an investment led by Ideaspring Capital. The company was co-founded in 2023 by Siva and Ganesh Guruswamy, both industry veterans spanning companies including Intel, AMD, Sandisk and Motorola....

In August last year, a little known semiconductor startup (at the time) founded by two industry veterans from India, announced a small, but historic milestone. Not just for themselves, but the country. The startup, HrdWyr Ventures, now more popularly, just HrdWyr, had struck two partnerships, one with Tata Electronics for the packaging of its first chip, and the other with boAt, the consumer elect...

HrdWyr, a Bengaluru-based semiconductor startup, recently secured $13 million in Series A funding led by Ideaspring Capital to advance its AI-native chip technology. The company specializes in System-on-Chip (AISoC) designs tailored for edge computing and real-world applications like electric vehicles and industrial equipment. A significant milestone for the firm is its partnership with boAt and T...

In today’s episode, I bring you Part 2 of an interview with Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO, at Ideaspring Capital in Bengaluru. In this episode, we pick up the conversation with a brief discussion on what the two VC investors are seeing when it comes to the growth of translational research in India — and I want to add that this was in the broader sense of any...

Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO at Ideaspring Capital, a well known deep tech VC firm in Bengaluru, sat down with me recently for an interview, which I'm publishing in two parts. Catch Part 2, the concluding part, tomorrow, in which they talk about the raise-invest-grow-exit imperative of venture investing, and what that means for investing in deep tech startup...

In today’s episode, on the occasion of World Environment Day, I bring you a conversation with Devdut Dalal (Dev), Xavier Laguarta Soler (Xavi) and Nathan Torbick (Nate), founders of Mitti Labs. Rice is a nutritional staple for nearly half the human population. Its cultivation is also a formidable contributor to global warming, accounting for 10-12 percent of all methane emissions from human activi...

Rice is one of our biggest staples, here in India, but the way our farmers grow it is becoming increasingly unsustainable, as it contributes to depleting our water tables to dangerous levels. Rice cultivation is also responsible for 10-12 percent of all methane released into the atmosphere from human activity — a gas that is 80-86 times more potent than CO2 in warming the planet over a 20-year per...

Today is the first day of the second year of this podcast. And in today’s episode of Conversations, I’m really happy to bring you part 1 of an interview with Naganand Doreswamy, partner, and Suryaprakash Konanuru, CTO, at Ideaspring Capital. They are among those few VC investors in India who were backing deep tech startups long before the government’s massive research and development and innovatio...

One could think of ‘Mitti’ — the Hindi word for soil — as representing the grounded foundation of a cooler future. And for us in India while rice that grows in our soil is a daily staple, its traditional cultivation is a hidden climate hazard. Rice cultivation worldwide is responsible for 10-12 percent of human-caused methane emissions. It also consumes staggering amounts of water. Coming up next...

Welcome to this bonus episode in which I’m following up with a quick interview with Ravi Kulkarni, founder and COO of Moonrider, an electric tractor venture in Bengaluru. In the previous episode, I brought you a detailed sit-down conversation with Anoop Srikantaswamy, Ravi’s fellow founder and CEO. Ravi is also a mechanical engineer by training, with a career spanning auto industry giants such as...

In this episode, I bring you a conversation with Anoop Srikantaswamy , founder and CEO of Moonrider , an electric tractor startup in Bengaluru. Anoop and his fellow founder Ravi Kulkarni bring deep background in the industry, having previously worked at automotive giants such as Toyota and Volvo Group. Mechanical engineers by training, the two are entrepreneurs at heart, with Anoop having previous...

Coming up, a conversation with Anoop Srikantaswamy, founder and CEO of Moonrider, an electric tractor maker in Bengaluru. Catch the full interview on Tuesday, May 19th right here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a short preview, in which Anoop talks about the state of commercialisation of autonomous tractors and what they might be like in the future. He also talks about the bigger pictur...

The first cohort of the India deep tech accelerator at University of Chicago’s Polsky Center. Image courtesy Polsky Center. (00:00) Just the headlines, if you only have a minute (01:26) The Polsky Center selects 20 Indian startups for first accelerator The University of Chicago’s Polsky Center has named 20 startups to the first cohort of its India Deep Tech Accelerator, a global programme for IIT-...

Coming up on Tuesday, 19th May, Anoop Srikantaswamy, founder and CEO of Moonrider, a electric tractor startup on Bengaluru, talks about a range of topics — from product innovation to reducing dependence on China to what tractors will be like in the future as they go autonomous. Catch the full conversation right here or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a short preview.

Pulkit Agrawal, Co-Founder of Eka Robotics. Image souce: Agrawal’s website. Eka Robotics has emerged from stealth with a Vision-Force-Action model that it says can push robots beyond the long-standing trade-off between generality and speed in manipulation tasks. The Cambridge, Massachusetts startup was co-founded in 2025 by MIT’s Pulkit Agrawal and former DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. The d...

In this episode, Stuti Kakkar, co-founder of MEINE Electric, a battery energy storage tech startup, unpacks the government’s proposed Approved List of Battery Manufacturers (ALBM) that is reportedly in the works as part of its ambitious $38 billion push to deploy 47 gigawatts of battery storage. Similar to the solar industry’s ALMM framework, this list aims to mandate localised supply chains for g...

Founder and CEO Saurabh Chandra with Ati Robotics’ humanoid research prototype Mecha at the company’s products day last year. Image credit: Hari Arakali. Ati Motors has renamed itself Ati Robotics to better reflect its evolution into a “material orchestration” specialist, the Bengaluru-based provider of autonomous mobile robots said in a recent press release. The Indian robotics company is moving...

Generated image for illustration: Globe showing interconnected climate data centers and data flow lines across continents The transition to a low-carbon economy is often framed as a struggle resulting from a combination of engineering challenges and lack of political willpower. A new vision paper argues that the true bottleneck is an information deficit. The Climate and Sustainability Data Exchang...

Inertia Enterprises co-founders (L-R) Prof. Mike Dunne, Jeff Lawson, Dr. Annie Kritcher. The company has struck a strategic partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to commercialise nuclear fusion science. Image courtesy Inertia (00:22) Microsoft clarifies stance on carbon credits purchases Microsoft issued a clarification after reports earlier this month that it had informed carbon...

Far from the romance and glamour of humanoids, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) such as tuggers and pallet lifters that don’t evoke any excitement — unless you’re an engineer, perhaps — are quietly trundling around factory floors, changing how things are made. But the transformation is nascent and factory executives still scratch their heads about what the real RoI (return on investment) might be f...