The Deep Science Forum 2024 showcased India's rapidly evolving deep science tech ecosystem. As the country becomes a global hub for cutting-edge technologies, we're witnessing a surge in innovation across sectors like AI, advanced materials, biotechnology and electronics & photonics. Coupled with India-specific enablers such as concerted policy pushes, availability of grant & other catalytic capital, and increasingly competitive R&D, these advances are creating a wave of deep science tech innovation that’s providing solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
Ankur Capital has been at the forefront of this effort, pioneering deep science tech investments in India and seeding an ecosystem to bring all the stakeholders together. Deep science tech ventures have unique journeys that need multiple stakeholders to come together. These journeys are characterized by techno commercial milestones in the path to scale-up and revenue growth. As these ventures move from science derisking to engineering & execution derisking, their activities also move towards setting up larger manufacturing plants, or partnering with large third party manufacturers, technology licensing, forming joint ventures, and optimizing supply chains. All of this put together means that deep science tech ventures’ different journeys need their own playbook and framework.
These journeys often happen in silos, with a lack of communication and engagement between the relevant ecosystem stakeholders. Building on its first-of-a-kind India Deep Science Tech Report published earlier this year, Ankur Capital’s Deep Science Forum 2024 was aimed at bringing the ecosystem together to understand these techno commercial journeys better – from early research, product development and pilots to creating an IP moat, ensuring manufacturability of the product, and raising investments from the right partners. The Forum attracted a diverse audience of over 200 participants, including early-stage and later-stage investors, entrepreneurs, industry experts, IP & regulatory experts, and academic researchers.
Charting a Journey from Ideation to Establishment
Deep science tech is spearheaded by entrepreneurs who have the vision and the tech to create paradigm shifts. The Forum therefore was centered on these entrepreneurs, and served as a platform for them to share their journeys. The day began with seasoned founders Anand Anandkumar (Bugworks Research) and Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics) sharing their experiences in establishing and scaling their respective startups. They emphasized the importance of perseverance, capital efficiency, and a strong focus on legacy when building a successful venture. Regulatory hurdles, policy challenges, and securing the right investments were common obstacles they faced.
Although both the companies had to pivot to the US to raise growth stage capital, Anand mentioned that India was now seeing new capital for Series A from impact investors and family offices, signaling a positive change in the ecosystem and maturity in the India capital stack.
With great promise comes long gestation periods: Visionary technologies’ journeys to become new paradigms
With deep science ventures’ long gestation periods spent in R&D, product development, there is a need to have deep moats to guard against shifting market demands. A key component of this is to have a platform technology defended by deep expertise and an IP portfolio & strategy. Another critical aspect of deep science tech ventures’ growth is the correct identification of the technocommercial milestones in their journeys, and to make sure each of them corresponds to a significant value creation step.
These themes were brought forward by speakers and presenters at the event. In particular Niramai’s Geetha Manjunath and String Bio’s Ezhil Subbian spoke about their companies’ journeys and the conviction they had in their technology platforms becoming the new state-of-the-art in their respective fields. While Niramai’s Thermalytix platform started as a screening technology, it has grown to even outperform the industry standard mammography techniques.
Early-stage derisking is the name of the game
Discussions through the day focused on early- and growth-stage de-risking of deep science tech startups. Hemant Mallapur of Tejas Networks, and a co-founder of Saankhya Labs, spoke about the importance of early partnerships and pilots that push startups’ products to be state-of-the-art, and how a good early partner can really accelerate the market readiness of your technology. Kiran Mysore, an investment Principal at UTEC-Edge in Japan, talked about the importance of “pain technology fit” - are you solving for a key pain point for your customer and are you on the path to find the least resistant/fastest adoptive market?
Jitendra Joshi, who heads carbon to products and alternate fuels at Woodside Energy, moderated a panel on the right business models for deep science tech ventures - how do you approach IP licensing, joint ventures with corporates, or even strategic investments, and what makes sense for a given startup given their sectoral focus and stage. He was joined by Akhil Shah of bp Ventures, Rishi Srivastava of OffGrid Energy Labs and Lalith Kishore of C-CAMP InDx. Given that M&A is a key part of the deep science ecosystem and an indicator of its health, Lalith Kishore said that an important early question to ask is if a deep tech venture deserves to be an independent company, or is the tech better served as a portfolio of a larger company.
Growth stage scale-up is accelerated by manufacturing readiness and finding the right partners
Setting up manufacturing plants, and bringing your tech to a level of manufacturability and industry-friendliness, are key parts of growing deep science tech ventures after the initial science de-risking. Ritu Verma, managing partner and co-founder of Ankur Capital, guided a discussion with Raghu Panicker of Kaynes Semiconductor and Subramani Ramachandranappa of Fermbox Bio where the key takeaways were the importance to secure the right talent and partnerships, to identify the processes or products which are amenable to rapid scale-up, and collaborating early with customers in the development process.
Investors, with their capital, vision and ability to support the gestation periods of deep science tech ventures, are key supporters and enablers. In the case of early-stage investments, the focus remains mainly on the team’s ability to execute the technology, and its commercial viability. Investors also felt that partnerships are essential— especially in deep science tech. One needs to build a strong team with complementary skills, and bring together the right investors and partners. These were key insights from the investor panel to close out the day - moderated by Vinod Kumar of String Bio, this panel featured investors across the seed to growth stage spectrum, with both financial and strategic lenses.
The event was powered by Amazon Web Services; that offers a comprehensive suite of cloud computing solutions to support businesses, organizations, and individuals in building innovative solutions, particularly ones powered by deep science tech in AI.
The Deep Science Forum 2024 provided valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities in the journey of a deep science tech startup. By understanding the importance of product iterations, market-fitment, and execution, entrepreneurs can navigate the future of innovation and create lasting value. If you are part of the deep science tech ecosystem, or are building in the space, please do reach out to suraj@ankurcapital.com or vishal.katariya@ankurcapital.com.
