My guests today are Murari Ramkumar and Dr. Nagesh Kini, founders of Vimano, a deep-tech startup headquartered in Bengaluru, India, specializing in advanced nanotechnology and materials science.

The company focuses on developing ion-conductive membranes that are critical components for energy transition applications, including Redox flow batteries, electrolyzers for green hydrogen production and Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells.

These technologies are essential for enabling cost-effective, long-duration energy storage and supporting the global shift toward renewable energy systems.

In this conversation, Murari and Dr. Nagesh give us a glimpse into their journey that started with a chance encounter at Thermax and has grown to a venture-funded membrane technologies startup, with early customers including the Indian Space Research Organisation. They are now backed by early-stage deep science and tech focused investor Ankur Capital, a VC firm that’s among the leaders in backing founders in India in sectors ranging from agri and biotech to B2B supply chain.

In this episode, the two entrepreneurs also delve into some of the technical and entrepreneurial hurdles of building a deep-tech startup in India, from fashioning their own manufacturing tools to navigating the funding landscape and scaling up in a resource-constrained environment. In fact, Murari and Dr. Nagesh bootstrapped Vimano for five years before Ankur Capital led their first institutional funding round.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a scientist, or simply curious about the future of deep tech in India, in this episode we offer a glimpse into a journey of turning lab-scale innovation into globally relevant products and solutions.

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My guest today is Kunal Khattar, founding managing partner at AdvantEdge Founders, an early-stage VC firm in New Delhi that’s well known for backing founders in the EV and mobility sectors in India. Kunal is well known for backing both consumer facing shared mobility ventures like Rapido and technology-led product innovation startups like Exponent Energy, which is a leader in fast-charging tech in India.

It's now 10 years since AdvantEdge was founded, Kunal says, and the firm is very close to announcing the first close of its third fund, which will likely be in the ballpark of $75 million, to back the next generation of EV entrepreneurs in India.

In this conversation, Kunal talks about why he expects the EV space to hit the J-curve growth stage over the next three to five years and how replacing the overall ICE economy in India is a trillion-dollar opportunity.

Kunal also talks about how because technology-led industry shifts can take decades, some promising technologies, like green hydrogen, for example, will take time to become mainstream.

My guest today is Saurabh Chandra, co-founder and CEO of Ati Motors, an autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) venture in Bengaluru. In this conversation, Saurabh talks about how the robots are coming – changing the industrial manufacturing landscape forever.

He talks about Ati’s own family of robots, named Sherpa, some early engineering decisions that have stood the company in good stead, and how Ati can go from shipping hundreds of robots to thousands, and more. We also briefly touched upon lessons from building a deep tech robotics company out of India.

Under Chandra’s leadership, Ati Motors has become a pioneer in developing AMRs for material movement in factories and warehouses. Unlike traditional automated guided vehicles (AGVs), Ati’s Sherpa robots are engineered to perform in the most challenging industrial environments — handling gradients, potholes, clutter, and even outdoor conditions.

This is made possible by a full-stack, first-principles approach and the use of advanced 3D LiDAR-based navigation, which allows Sherpa robots, today best known for their tugging capabilities, to operate without any external markers, reflectors, or teleoperation. All autonomy is processed onboard, ensuring robust performance even in environments with unreliable connectivity.

Ati’s current portfolio of AMRs include the Sherpa Tug, Sherpa Lifter, Sherpa Pallet Mover, and Sherpa Pivot. The company has some 50 customers in India, Southeast Asia and North America, Chandra says, including names such as Forvia and Hyundai.

On building AMRs out of India, Chandra credits Bengaluru’s multidisciplinary talent pool and thriving manufacturing ecosystem as important advantages that support innovation. The day isn’t that far away when, in factories and warehouses and other such complexes, “whatever moves is going to be autonomous,” he says.

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My guest today is Bhaktha Ram Keshavachar, founder and CEO of Chara Technologies, in Bengaluru. Chara is at the forefront of a technological shift that could reshape for the better India’s electric mobility landscape, and potentially make an impact overseas as well.

The mission is both urgent and ambitious: to build high-performance electric motors that are free of rare earth magnets — a critical component in most electric vehicles and industrial machines today.

Bhaktha and his fellow founders Ravi Prasad, the chief motor designer, and Mahalingam Koushik, the CTO at Chara, are engineering veterans from industry, each one bringing decades of experience to their entrepreneurial journey.

It started in late 2019, just as the world was heading into the uncertainty of the Covid pandemic. Recognizing the strategic and environmental risks posed by global dependence on rare earth minerals — most of which are controlled by a single country — he and his team set out to engineer an alternative.

The result is a new generation of reluctance motors, designed and manufactured in India, that match or surpass the efficiency of traditional permanent-magnet motors, while sidestepping the environmental and geopolitical pitfalls of rare earth mining.

In this conversation, Bhaktha shares the technical and business challenges Chara has overcome — from early R&D pivots and tackling the challenge of torque ripple in reluctance motors, to building a pilot production facility and securing industry partnerships, including a manufacturing and distribution alliance with Greaves Cotton.

He discusses the hurdles of deep tech entrepreneurship in India, the evolving talent landscape, and Chara’s plan to take its products global.

Whether you’re a founder, investor, engineer, or simply curious about the future of cleaner technology, this episode offers an example of how Indian deep tech innovation is rising to meet one of the challenges of our era: building a sustainable, secure, and scalable electric future — one motor at a time.

My guest today is Karthee Madasamy, founding managing partner at MFV Partners, a US-based early-stage, deep-tech focused VC firm.

In this episode, Karthee gives us a quick overview of MFV’s $25 million Harper Court Ventures Fund 1, a specialized vehicle bridging academic research and commercial viability for the deep tech startups coming out of the University of Chicago.

He talks about how the fund addresses critical gaps in early-stage ecosystems through “smart funding,” meaning combining capital with hands-on operational support, to translate lab breakthroughs into viable companies.

The model focuses on high-impact sectors where UChicago holds world-class capabilities, including quantum computing, life sciences, energy, and artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional VC, the fund embeds itself in the university's innovation pipeline – collaborating with accelerators, tapping extensive alumni networks, and guiding startups from IP validation to Series A readiness.

Early bets include Flow Medical, which is developing a next-generation catheter-based therapy to treat acute pulmonary embolism,

SimCare AI, which is developing a platform for clinical skills training and evaluation, and Beacon, which is developing technology that eliminates viruses, bacteria, and molds from air and surfaces.

Karthee also briefly discusses potential takeaways and best practices from partnerships such as the Harper Court fund, which are not new in the US, for the India’s emerging deep tech ecosystem.

My guest today is Vishal Katariya, a member of the investment team at Ankur Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm in Mumbai. Vishal is based in Bengaluru.

It’s World Environment Day today, and Vishal’s here to talk about why and how India is uniquely positioned to lead in building climate solutions that work for the world. Vishal is one of the authors of Ankur’s recent report on private investments in climate tech, titled Transforming India’s Core Sectors, along with one Ankur’s founding managing partners Ritu Verma, Shiva Shanker, partner, and Debansh Sahoo, who’s also on the firm’s investment team.

To quote from a brief on the report, entrepreneurs are drawing on India’s deep talent pool, a problem-solving mindset shaped by constraint, and a lived understanding of the Global South – not to chase emissions reductions alone, but because industries increasingly recognize that rethinking how we produce, grow, move, and power things is critical to staying competitive and creating long-term economic value in a changing world.

The report presents a data-backed analysis of how startups and venture investments are shaping these efforts. It tracks 2020–2024 funding trends across India and global markets in five sectors: energy, food and land use, transportation, industrial decarbonization, and carbon and climate management.

In this conversation, Vishal walks us through a quick overview of Ankur’s findings and briefly touches upon the implications for founders and investors.

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