How One Angel Investor Is Solving India's Deep Tech Funding Gap

How One Angel Investor Is Solving India's Deep Tech Funding Gap

There's a version of the Indian startup story that gets repeated constantly: seed rounds are getting bigger, unicorns keep multiplying, VC interest has never been higher. I

t's a true story, as far as it goes. What it leaves out is an entire category of founders who have spent the last few years quietly hitting a wall that never makes the headlines.

That wall is what this conversation is really about.

A Track Record Before the Real Story Starts

Our guest has been angel investing for twelve years. In his own words, he has personally written more than 75 checks into companies over that time, and been a limited partner in several funds on top of that.

Among the early bets was one of the first checks into Rapido, made alongside two friends, one of whom went on to found Spinny.

That alone could carry an entire episode. But the more interesting part of the story starts three or four years later, with a shift in focus toward a much harder category of startup: deep tech.

Where Deep Tech Gets Stuck

Over the past three to four years, he has been investing more seriously in companies building in defense, robotics, hardware, IoT, and life sciences. What he kept noticing was a consistent pattern across nearly all of them.

These companies could raise a seed round. Many could get to a Series A, or close to it. And then, repeatedly, the capital stopped flowing.

Not because the businesses were failing. Deep tech, by nature, takes longer to reach the kind of momentum that makes a typical venture investor comfortable writing a bigger check.

Domestic VCs, largely optimized for faster-moving software and consumer businesses, weren't always willing to wait that long, even when they weren't necessarily wrong to have doubts.

He and his network had a different read. They could see the underlying potential in these companies.

 They had conviction that the long build cycle was a feature of the category, not a red flag about the founders running it.

From Helping a Few Founders to Building a Service

What happened next started small.

He began spending time with these founders working through what came next: how to think about the stall, how to reposition the pitch, whether the story they were telling investors was even the right one.

That turned into a more direct question: could he and his network use their global connections to help these companies find capital outside India?

The early experiments worked. Family offices in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Dubai started writing checks into companies that couldn't get traction with domestic investors.

From there, the network expanded further, into direct relationships with global funds, including Google Ventures, a16z, Menlo Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Khosla Ventures.

A friend doing similar work, and doing it even better in some ways, joined the effort.

Where our guest was making introductions, his friend was closing them.

 Together, they built something that started to look less like informal favors and more like an actual pipeline.

How the Work Scaled

The next stage of growth came from something founders do naturally: talk to each other.

Founders who had been helped started referring friends facing the exact same problem, stuck at a Series B or C, unable to raise domestically, needing a bridge to capital outside India.

Eventually, the pattern repeated at the fund level too.

Funds that had watched this work happen started referring their own portfolio companies directly, essentially outsourcing a piece of their portfolio support function to this informal network.

At that point, the work had to become more structured. Sitting with founders to fix their pitch and sharpen the articulation of what they were building.

Helping with decks. Building outreach plans. Making the actual introductions. What started as a favor between friends had become, in practice, a fundraising advisory service.

How the Economics Work

The model, as he describes it, is straightforward: a commission of three to five percent, depending on the size and stage of the company and the effort involved, paid out only when the capital is actually raised. Not a retainer.

Not fees for advice regardless of outcome. Payment tied directly to results.

It's a structure that keeps incentives aligned. As he put it, the intent has to be that the founder sees real value, and the fee only comes once that value has actually been delivered.

The Bigger Picture

Strip away the specific numbers and specific funds, and what's left is a genuinely useful observation about the Indian startup ecosystem: strong companies exist in categories that Indian capital isn't always built to support.

Deep tech's long timelines run up against a domestic VC model that, understandably, favors faster paths to scale.

The gap isn't a lack of good businesses. It's a mismatch between how long these businesses take to mature and how long most local investors are willing to wait.

What's notable is that closing this gap didn't require a new fund or a new institution.

 It started with one person doing informal favors for a handful of founders he believed in, and it grew because the results were real enough that founders, and eventually funds, kept coming back.

The Takeaway

If there's a lesson here beyond the specifics of deep tech fundraising, it might be this: sometimes the most valuable thing in an ecosystem isn't more capital.

 It's someone willing to build the bridge to capital that already exists elsewhere, and to keep building it long enough that it stops being a favor and starts being infrastructure.

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