Gunjan Kapadia was 30, married, and seven years into a stable career when he decided to quit his well-paying job. That trope’s quite the familiar route to modern-day entrepreneurship. Except Kapadia had decided to take a long detour that had his close ones flummoxed. He wasn’t starting up. Well, not yet.
Kapadia was returning to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras from where he had acquired an MTech degree six years earlier. This time for a PhD in chemical engineering.
“I was making much more money. I was married at that point,” Kapadia recalls. “My wife was very supportive. [But] my family was a bit sceptical. They kept asking, ‘Why do you want to go for a PhD? You can get a job.’”
He wasn’t pursuing a doctor of philosophy degree for an academic title or career. Kapadia entered the PhD programme with a clear ambition: to solve a deep, scientific problem and eventually build a company around it.
India has produced several PhD entrepreneurs, Zoho Corp’s Sridhar Vembu (a Princeton PhD) and Sarvam AI’s Vivek Raghavan (from Carnegie Mellon) among them. But choosing a PhD specifically to build a startup is a still-evolving genre. And not without its share of risks. It demands years of research, patient capital and a bet that deeptech will eventually reward scientific depth over speed.
Which is why Kapadia’s decision stands out. He was on a mission.
“Look around your room. Your phone, your car, your air conditioner. Check whether the core technology behind them was developed in India. Very little of it is. To develop core technology, you have to understand a problem in detail. A PhD forces you to work on one problem for a long period of time. You learn the science behind it, physics, chemistry, the fundamentals. Engineering can be learnt on the job, but fundamental science takes years.”
Two years ago, Kapadia, along with Akhil Kongara and Muhammed Hamdan, who were also pursuing doctoral degrees at IIT-M, launched Sthyr Energy. Last year, the deeptech startup raised $1 million in seed funding. Their target: to develop mechanically rechargeable zinc-air battery systems for long-duration and seasonal energy storage—critical for India’s renewable energy ambitions. The gamechanger: their focus on zinc-air, a cheaper, more stable, and more abundantly available alternative to the standard lithium-ion used in battery systems.
Building a deeptech ecosystem
The nearly 70-year-old IIT-Madras has spawned a robust ecosystem offering support to deeptech startups like Sthyr Energy. Among its entrepreneurship-focused initiatives is the IIT Madras Incubation Cell (IITMIC), which was established in 2003 and has since supported more than 560 startups currently boasting a combined valuation of over ₹74,000 crore.
Several well-known deeptech startups have emerged from IIT-M’s startup ecosystem, including electric two-wheeler maker Ather Energy, the Palo Alto, California-headquartered Uniphore that’s building business-focused artificial intelligence (AI), and MediBuddy, a digital healthcare platform.
For much of the past decade, the archetypal Indian startup founder has been an IIT engineer or a graduate of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) running consumer-internet businesses, essentially building technology layers over existing services rather than developing core technologies in-house.
But as geopolitics reshapes global supply chains, and investors in India hunt for the next wave of growth in sectors such as AI, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy, the spotlight is turning to research-led startups.
This is evident in the funding that India’s deeptech sector scored last year—a massive jump from $484 million in 2020 to $1.47 billion in 2025, per data platform Tracxn. The number of deeptech startups increased from about 2,700 in 2022 to more than 4,200 by 2025, per Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies) and consulting firm Zinnov.
Universities are redesigning their PhD programmes, venture capital investors are warming to technically trained founders, and a growing number of doctoral students are entering research with plans for a startup, rather than academia, as the end goal.
The Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) launched its PhD-Drive programme in 2023 to encourage researchers to commercialise their work through deeptech startups. It is designed to address one of the biggest barriers faced by young researchers: taking entrepreneurial risks immediately after completing a doctoral programme.
“By the time one finishes a PhD, one is 26-27 years of age. At that time, to take a plunge into startups is very rare with our family, friends, and all of that in India,” says Prof. V. Ramgopal Rao, group vice-chancellor, BITS Pilani Campuses. “So many of them don’t go to build startups. They need to settle down and that’s kind of a problem. We said, ‘those aspects we will take care.’”
BITS Pilani’s PhD-Drive programme trains students to also identify intellectual property opportunities, develop business models, pitch to investors, navigate certification requirements, and understand the realities of building a company.
The institute had good reason to start this programme. Over the past decade, deeptech startups founded by BITS Pilani alumni have collectively raised $549.6 million, according to Tracxn, while deeptech startups founded by IIT-Madras alumni have raised $1 billion. Also, while IIT-Madras more than doubled the number of startups it incubated to 110 in 2025-26 from 43 in FY23, BITS Pilani increased its count to 136 from 97 over that period, data from the respective universities showed.
Road to product nation
Around 700 km from Chennai, in Kerala’s Ernakulam, Yadukrishnan K. too wanted to build a deeptech startup. But convincing his family to back him seemed impossible. Then he stumbled upon something unusual while scrolling through LinkedIn: an applied PhD programme at BITS Pilani’s School of Interdisciplinary Research and Entrepreneurship (SIRE), where the end goal was to build a startup around the research. “For my family, the PhD became the safer option,” he says. “Starting a startup directly sounded risky. But when it came with a PhD, it was much easier to convince them.”
BITS Pilani is currently incubating Yadukrishnan’s Mediqor Aid Technologies, which is developing an automated medical bed with an integrated toilet system for bedridden patients.
The growing pursuit of innovation-led startups coincides with an emerging shift in India’s startup ecosystem from distribution-led tech businesses to deeptech sectors. “Middle-class and upper-middle-class consumption in India is no longer growing at the same pace of 15–18% annually that it did a decade ago, it is growing more in line with (India’s) GDP,” says Ashish Kumar, co-founder and general partner at F2A (Fundamentum Frontier Advisors). “When the next generation of founders comes in, they will have to look for opportunities where growth rates are much higher.”
F2A, launched in May, is a ₹3,000-crore venture capital platform focused on consumer AI, enterprise AI, and physical AI that’s co-led by general partner Debraj Banerjee and anchored by Infosys co-founder and Aadhaar co-architect Nandan Nilekani. The original Fundamentum brand had largely invested in broader themes across technology and consumer startups such as used-cars platform Spinny, entertainment platform Kuku, and PharmEasy.
The deeptech opportunity, Kumar believes, lies in sovereign product innovation. “Because of geopolitical realities, countries are pushing to build the supply chain for certain critical infrastructure and critical applications domestically,” says Kumar. “This requires product innovation, which in turn requires people with deep research backgrounds and PhDs. By contrast, distribution innovation—which is what India excelled at over the last 10 to 15 years—required founders who were much more business-oriented.”
Indian universities have identified that need. “There is a realization that India has to be self-reliant on advanced technologies to overcome the restrictions imposed for technology transfers across borders,” says Rao of BITS Pilani. “PhD studies provide that deeper understanding of science and technology to develop deeptech products. We need to create a larger ecosystem to have PhD students think beyond academic positions and become entrepreneurs.”
For founders, a doctoral programme focused on converting into a startup offers access not just to laboratories but also mentors, industry networks, and government funding that can significantly blunt the risks involved in developing a new technology.
“If you are doing a PhD in a good institute you get a lot of government grants to de-risk the science part of it,” says Kapadia of Sthyr Energy. “Anyone would not want to invest in a project just because it seems interesting. That risk you can take when you are in your PhD. You have common infrastructure available, government grants are available, and you can work on that idea.”
R&D funding gap
Universities in the US have long offered programmes that encourage researchers to commercialise their work. Stanford University’s Lean LaunchPad course, developed by entrepreneur Steve Blank and first taught in 2011, trains researchers to validate and build startups around their technologies.
That model is now firming up in India as well. BITS Pilani has two pathways to its PhD-DRIVE programme. “One is for students who already have a problem statement, a technology and a startup idea. They build their PhD around that, receive a mentor, a stipend, and ₹10 lakh to develop a prototype,” says Rao. “The second pathway is for students who have entrepreneurial intent but not an idea. We source commercially relevant problems from industry and our own research, and match them with the right students.”
The course currently has 19 PhD students and will be enrolling another 15 in August. “The current students are spread across sensors, embedded systems, advanced materials, pharma and biotechnology areas. We see strong interest in AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) and robotics areas,” adds Rao.
The Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad is also planning a PhD programme that will have students focus on developing commercially viable products or processes. “I’m approaching a large number of industries to see if they can support a PhD programme that will lead to a product rather than just a thesis,” says Prof. B. S. Murty, director of IIT-Hyderabad, in a YouTube video. “It is important that when you want technologies and products to emerge, industry and academia work together so that the product or process developed at the end of the PhD programme can be taken forward by industry, commercialised, and made popular not only within the country but also outside it.”
Such industry-academia partnership is key to nurturing an innovation culture that’s currently acutely lacking in India. The Union government has repeatedly flagged the low level of private-sector investment in research and development. The Economic Survey 2025-26 noted that the private sector accounted for only about 41% of India’s gross expenditure on research and development. That’s still an improvement from the 36% mentioned in the Economic Survey 2023-24. But in innovation-driven economies such as the US and China, businesses fund more than 70% of R&D spending.
Even so, investors are willing to back the incremental progress so far. “We’re definitely looking at a lot more deeptech opportunities,” says Anirudh Damani, managing partner of Artha Venture Fund, which is in talks to sign memoranda of understanding with incubators at legacy Indian universities. “... We are partnering with more universities so that we get access to deal flow much earlier, probably around the ideation stage.” The firm also has a programme called Artha Access through which it co-invests up to ₹1 crore in deeptech startups with early-stage incubators and accelerators.
Problems and opportunities
India faces a shortage of deeptech talent. In artificial intelligence, India had about 420,000 professionals in 2024 against an estimated demand for 600,000 experts, according to a report by Nasscom and consulting firm McKinsey. As for deeptech startups, India currently has 7,504 firms, much lower than the 26,258 in the US, per data platform Tracxn.
Founders and investors both see the opportunity evident in this shortage, with the PhD-to-entrepreneurship trend filling the funnel. “Deeptech often rewards specialists. Whether it’s battery chemistry or RF (radio frequency) hardware, it takes three to four years of dedicated work just to develop a real feel for the sector—and most founders don’t have that runway before they need to be building,” says Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner, Speciale Invest, an early-stage VC firm. “That’s why we gravitate toward founders with deep institutional grounding in technology—through incubation, centres of excellence, or degrees like PhDs, BTech, and MTech. Sixty percent of our investments have gone to founders with this kind of technology-institution affiliation.”
For F2A’s Kumar, a PhD offers a filter for evaluating investments. “If you look at the first 10 to 15 people in an AI or deeptech company, our expectation is that roughly 20–25% of them should have very deep technical expertise in the specific domain and problem the company is trying to solve.” While some fast-moving technology cycles may evolve before a potential founder can complete their PhD, frontier sectors such as biosciences and space are still nascent, giving researchers enough runway to build companies around their research, he adds.
“These startups will take time to mature and the ecosystem would need to keep pace on aspects such as regulation and funding,” says Janak Nabar, chief executive of the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Economic Research (CTIER). “Beyond supervision, PhD entrepreneurs also need access to funding and support to scale. Early-stage capital is available, and initiatives like the RDI fund (the government’s ₹1 trillion Research, Development, and Innovation Fund) are a positive step, but the ecosystem is still evolving. The building blocks are in place, but it will take time.”
For context, nearly 70% of deeptech funding in India is concentrated in early-stage investment rounds, leaving only a few companies able to secure Series B and later-stage capital required for commercialisation and scaling up, per a India Deep Tech Report 2025 by Kae Capital and TDK Ventures.
Deeptech entrepreneurs like Kapadia and Yadukrishnan will be hoping that the ecosystem matures fast. C. S. Murali already sees some evidence of that. He is the chairman of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) at the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science’s (IISc) Foundation for Science, Innovation and Development. FSID has supported around 140 startups over the past decade, most of them in deeptech, and roughly one-third promoted by IISc professors, often along with their students.
“With all the developments that have happened in India in the last 10–15 years, there is an increasing recognition that there are a lot of problems to be solved in India itself where science can solve those problems a lot more effectively,” says Murali. “Whether it is providing drinking water from polluted water or producing hydrogen from agricultural waste.”
- $1.47 billion: Funding into India’s deeptech startups in 2025, up from $484 million in 2020, reflecting growing investor interest in research-led ventures.
- 4,200+: The number of deeptech startups in the country last year, up from 2,700 in 2022, as AI, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing gather momentum.
- 41%: Private sector’s share of India's R&D spending, compared with over 70% in countries such as the US and China.
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