'There's a lot of momentum compared to five years ago'

Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed India, tells Deepsekhar Choudhury and Tarunya Sanjay why India's start-ups are seeing a surge in scientific ambition. Edited excerpts

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Is India producing enough high-quality deep-tech start-ups compared to the e-commerce and fintech sectors?

As investors, we always want more and more founders to show up so we can deploy more high-quality capital behind the highest-quality founders. So, the answer is yes and no.

When I joined Lightspeed in 2018, I probably saw one or two deep tech or frontier-tech companies a month. Now, in just one week, I've seen a company trying to cure depression with a headset, a brain-computer interface company installing headsets on animals to translate what they're feeling to human owners, a robotics company and a nuclear-fusion company.

So yes, things are coming up. When we invested in Pixxel Space, it was one of just 20-25 companies in the entire region doing anything in space tech. Now there are over 300 companies, a 10x improvement in four years. Compared to China or the US, we still have a long way to go, but compared to India five years ago, there's a lot of momentum.

There's a perception that deep-tech start-ups in India don't get enough funding or customers and hence flip to the US.

Companies should flip where their market is. If your customers are Indian defence companies or local buyers, there's no sense flipping to the US. But if your buyers are in the US, you need to be in that market.

Pixxel Space flipped to the US not because they could raise more money there, but because their clientele was based there. They had to build a team to sell into that clientele, both government and non-government.