India's Next Tech Wave: Deeptech, Not Just Apps

lalit keshri the cofounder of grow just said his company's tail was 2016 today he says is for deep tech just yesterday in our briefing we were digging into the real money moves in indian tech and this statement from the guy who built one of the biggest consumer fintech unicorns is a massive signal about where the next phase of growth is coming from it's a fundamental shift in the landscape so here are the headlines shaping the ecosystem first that statement from kshrey is the big one he's essentially saying the gold rush in consumer internet the wave that created gro zamato all the household names is over he believes the next major value creation won't come from another app but from companies tackling fundamental scientific and engineering challenges this isn't just an observation it's a founder of a $10,000,000,000 plus company telling you the playbook that made him successful is now outdated and if you want proof look at the funding news money control just put out its weekly roundup of startup deals and while capital is

still flowing you're not seeing the kind of massive headline grabbing consumer rounds that define the twenty sixteen to 2021 era the deals are happening but the energy the excitement the sheer gravitational pull of capital is starting to point somewhere else the quietness on the consumer front is actually the story it reinforces k shrey's point perfectly the game has changed what got us here won't get us there so let's go deeper on this deep tech pivot because it's the most important shift happening in the ecosystem right now when a founder like lalit keishrais says our time was 2016 he's not being modest he's mapping the future for you gross surf the wave of smartphone penetration cheap data and a rising middle class hungry for financial products that was a distribution and user experience problem it was about building a better slicker front end for an existing system deep tech is completely different this isn't about a better user interface this is about fundamental research and development we're talking about companies in sectors like biotech creating new

diagnostic tools or therapies we're talking about space tech building satellites and launch vehicles we're talking about new material science advanced battery chemistry or even building the core ai models themselves not just wrapping a service around someone else's api it's the difference between building a food delivery app and inventing a new sustainable way to grow food one is software the other is science so why is this happening now couple of reasons first the consumer internet market is just saturated there are only so many times you can reinvent ecommerce or fintech for the same user base the low hanging fruit has been picked second india's talent pool has matured the engineers who cut their teeth building those

massive consumer apps are now looking for harder problems to solve and we have a generation of scientists and phds who are now seeing a viable path to commercialize their research a path that barely existed ten years ago but here's the part that really matters for anyone investing in or building in this space the rules are totally different a deep tech company can't be built in eighteen months with a series a b and c the timelines are longer the capital required upfront for labs and equipment is significant and the risk is much more binary either your science works or it doesn't you can't a b test your way to a new battery chemistry the upside though it's monumental a successful deep tech company doesn't just have a product it has a true defensible moat built on patents and proprietary research you can't just copy the code you can't hire a rival team and replicate it in six months this is about creating something genuinely new it's a move from building businesses based on network effects to

building them based on technological breakthroughs kaishri's comment is the starting gun it signals to the entire venture ecosystem that the easy money era is over and the era of hard tech has begun this isn't a trend it's a rewiring of the entire indian startup ecosystem shifting the focus from apps to atoms