Let platform-building be a pattern, not an aberration

India has proven that it can build platforms. What is needed now is relentless, high-velocity execution.

On July 18, 2026, Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 launch made India only the third country in the world, after the US and China, with private orbital launch capability.

Skyroot was founded nearly eight years ago by former ISRO scientists. Its leaps from then to now required scientific expertise, patient investors, access to public infrastructure, regulatory support, and close engagement with ISRO (PTI)

Skyroot was founded nearly eight years ago by former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists. Its leaps from then to now required scientific expertise, patient investors, access to public infrastructure, regulatory support, and close engagement with ISRO and the wider space ecosystem.

A company may spend years developing a product; even after a successful demonstration, it still has to manufacture it, find customers, raise more capital, meet certification requirements and build a business before attaining commercial success

Skyroot has crossed several of these barriers. Most startups do not. Let’s try and understand why. You are an engineer and want to build a grid-scale battery technology that can help manage renewable power more reliably.

The first few years are spent in research and development, and trying to show that the technology is safe, reliable, and actually works.

At this stage, India does have entry points for a founder like you. An Atal Incubation Centre may provide early mentoring, facilities, and connections. If the technology has a defence application, the Innovations for Defence Excellence programme may support its development. A biotechnology startup may turn to BIRAC, while companies working in semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technology or space can draw on the wider mission architecture that the government has built around these sectors.

Public funding can crowd-in private capital. The original Fund of Funds for Startups committed its full corpus to 145 alternative investment funds (AIFs).

For your battery company, this support might help pay for laboratory equipment, early experiments and a first demonstration with a utility. Eventually, the utility runs a pilot and your system performs well. You have shown that the technology works in a real environment.

Now, you need to sell your demonstrated technology.

For many startups, a successful pilot does not automatically turn into a commercial order. The market likes your system, but wants more evidence. It asks whether an independent body has tested your batteries under full operating conditions, and if you can manufacture it in larger quantities. It wants to know who will stand behind performance guarantees and warranties over the next decade. Lenders and insurers are cautious because the technology has no proven long-term track record.

That is where many startups encounter the missing middle: Seed equity was enough to build prototypes, but now you need money for tooling, plant, certification, inventory, and working capital. Meanwhile, conventional loans are hard to obtain because you have limited revenue and few assets. You are too far along for a small grant and too early for regular project finance.

The Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0 is explicitly weighted toward deep tech and technology-driven manufacturing, with the aim of widening India’s shallow domestic venture capital base.

The Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme adds a ₹1 lakh crore corpus of long-tenure financing, including unsecured loans at under 3% interest. It can support projects at higher technology readiness levels and finance up to half the cost of qualifying projects, with the rest arranged by promoters or commercial sources. For your battery startup, this is potentially transformative.

Yet the broader funding picture remains sobering. Indian deep-tech startups raised a mere $1.65 billion in 2025, while American deep-tech companies raised roughly $147 billion dollars and Chinese companies $81 billion dollars. These numbers show us why new schemes must move quickly from cabinet approval to money actually reaching founders.

Deep-tech companies will not scale if government, investors, and customers are willing to fund only technologies that have already become safe bets. The Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0 and the RDI Scheme give the government tools to absorb some early technology risk, while mechanisms such as SIDBI’s Partial Risk Sharing Facility can help make unfamiliar technologies more acceptable to lenders. But public money cannot carry the system alone. Domestic venture funds, insurance companies, pension funds, family offices and high-net-worth individuals must become more willing to invest patiently.

Even with better capital, your company still needs a market. This is where government procurement must change. India’s innovators need scale to survive, and the government can help by becoming the first serious buyer of technologies that meet clearly defined standards.

The L1 approach — contract awards on the basis of the lowest upfront price — will disadvantage young companies whose technologies may cost more initially but deliver greater value over their lifetime. The Indian Army’s first procurement order under the iDEX programme, awarded in 2023 to startup Hyper Stealth Technologies for an indigenously developed mobile camouflage system, shows what this pathway can look like. The challenge is to make such examples routine rather than exceptional.

Government challenge programmes should also be open enough to attract the best solutions, including partnerships involving global expertise. At the same time, projects built around national priorities should be led by Indian-headquartered consortia with majority Indian ownership and manufacturing, for the value created through the technology, production and jobs to remain largely with Indian companies and workers.

Corporate India can bring distribution, manufacturing scale, procurement relationships, and domain expertise that startups cannot easily build on their own. The India Deep Tech Alliance brings together serious venture capital firms.

For a company like yours, a partnership like this would mean a first paying customer, access to manufacturing capacity, specialised know-how and a route into global markets. For the corporate, it offers a live pipeline of innovation, early sight of technologies in semiconductors, robotics and AI, and a way to share the risk of betting on new tech by co-investing alongside specialist venture capital funds.

Your company also needs access to shared laboratories, compute infrastructure, certification facilities, and pilot-manufacturing lines, rather than having to build all of them from scratch. You need institutions that can underwrite technology risk by providing guarantees and validation, and public-sector buyers who can judge lifecycle performance and strategic value.

Behind all this lies India’s research base. Gross R&D expenditure remains below 0.7% of GDP, well below the OECD average of about 2.7%. The private sector contributes only about a third of India’s R&D spending. This must change structurally to provide impetus to corporate R&D and stronger links between companies, universities, and public laboratories.

India has proven that it can build platforms. Our next test: Can this become a pattern rather than a singular achievement?

The policy scaffolding is largely in place, and corporate India is beginning to show up as a genuine capital and market partner. What India needs now is relentless, high-velocity execution.

Amitabh Kant is the chancellor of NIIT University, chairman, Fairfax Centre for Free Enterprise, former G20 Sherpa, India, and former CEO, NITI Aayog. The views expressed are personal