Qualcomm has been investing in India for 17 years and says now there is a clear shift by investors and entrepreneurs to sectors like chips, robotics, AI and quantum.
India has had a strong and enduring reputation for consumer and fintech startups, with the likes of Swiggy, Zomato, Meesho, Groww, Pine Labs, etc. seeing strong exits recently.
But there appears to be a growing shift towards deep tech, as evidenced by the formation of the India Deep Tech Investment Alliance in September last year with a $1bn capital commitment. The alliance saw a boost in November when Indian corporate investors Qualcomm Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures also joined in.
The timing, according to Rama Bethmangalkar, managing director of Qualcomm Ventures India, is right for looking at deep tech in India.
“Indian entrepreneurship is maturing from consumer-driven businesses and problems to more engineering and science-driven ones, such as semiconductors, quantum, and has a lot to do with the scale at which India consumes AI,” he believes.
“These are the hard problems that founders are now thinking about solving.”
At the same time, Bethmangalkar has noticed a shift in the way investors are thinking. Previously, investors turned towards consumer applications since the return on investment tended to be faster.
“You’d know yes or no very quickly, so you could either double down or stop investing and look elsewhere. But the gestation time to determine whether you were on the right track or not was much longer with deep tech, which made VCs hesitate. That’s no longer the case.”
Deep tech investing was always a focus
Qualcomm has been investing in India for a long time, with the Qualcomm Ventures team in India setting up in 2008, eight years after the main investment arm was established in 2000. Their first investment, also in 2008, was in MapMyIndia, a digital map and tracking platform that had its public market debut in 2021.
“We began identifying companies that were deep tech from an early stage,” says Bethmangalkar. “We knew India was different, the market and the use cases were different. We realised mapping would also be different and an important deep tech project. The investment in MapMyIndia made sense, and it helped that it aligned with the deep tech arm of our investment thesis.”
The Qualcomm Ventures India team has also seen the startup ecosystem evolve over their 17 years of investing in the country.
“Till maybe 2016, some of the brightest entrepreneurs in the country were looking at building consumer tech options since that was the need of the hour. That led to the rise of Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Ola. Then came the fintech revolution. Today, we have some of the best software products available in the market – look at the service delivery and quick commerce subsector, for example. It makes you realise how advanced our economy is thanks to the work done by our entrepreneurs.”
“We began identifying companies that were deep tech from an early stage. We knew India was different, the market and the use cases were different.”
That’s when Bethmangalkar noticed a shift taking place.
“Entrepreneurs started wondering what to do next and began to move towards tackling different problems.”
Startups focusing on deep tech began to emerge – something the CVC unit noticed and invested in. This included unmanned aircraft systems maker IdeaForge, electric motorcycle maker Ultraviolette and SaaS platform Capillary Technologies.
“You had the founders of IdeaForge who’d come up with this idea of drones that could have use cases beyond defence, for example. Imagine developing something way ahead of its time that could be used for B2B logistics in a zone spanning a radius of several hundred kilometres,” he says.
“Then, more recently, we had the electric vehicle phenomenon. And what all this has led to is entrepreneurs slowly getting more confident to enter this space as they see others succeeding.”
The problem, however, has been a lack of broad-based investor support within the deep tech sector in India. Qualcomm Ventures has stepped into that gap, but Bethmangalkar says he is keen to see more investors do the same.
“We’re a tech company. We understand that certain technologies take time for gestation. We have the patience, we have the capital, we’re not bound by the constraints of four-year fund deployment cycles.
“So, we were some of the investors backing deep tech founders very early on, but it’s not enough. You need a much broader ecosystem of investors to back such founders, and that’s where the IDTA comes in.”
IDTA and its impact on the ecosystem
The India Deep Tech Alliance, launched in September 2025, is made up of Indian and US investors who have committed to investing capital in Indian deep tech startups over the next five to 10 years in sectors such as semiconductors, space, quantum computing, robotics and artificial intelligence.
The formation of the alliance was led by deep tech VC firm Celesta Capital, a steady coinvestor in a number of Qualcomm Ventures’ portfolio companies including IdeaForge.
“One of the things we’d discussed in the past was the low level of investor interest in deep tech,” says Bethmangalkar.
“We’d talk about the investor ecosystem in India – what we could do, how we could make them aware that there are interesting companies and founders in deep tech and that there’s money to be made in deep tech.”
He believes it was the Indian government’s strong intention on solving some of these problems that’s acted as a catalyst.
“India’s per capita income is lower but the quality of R&D, engineering, science is still very high. What that translates to is India’s advantage where we can deliver innovation at a much lower cost as compared to Silicon Valley.”
“Deep tech companies need more time and capital to reach a particular milestone. Investors were wary of underwriting that because the risk was too high. So when the government came in with close to a $12bn outlay for funding to spur R&D in deep tech, it became an interesting rallying point for investors as well.”
What this effectively means is that investors who were previously on the fence are more inclined to invest now that there is government backing. Bethmangalkar believes those who were already investing will continue to do so but what will give them more strength is the knowledge that other investors are also looking to join in.
“It means someone can take a very early risk or a seed stage risk, or someone feels more confident coming in at a later stage like series B – which has typically been the time when it gets harder to raise capital. I think the IDTA can help resolve this.”
As for what makes Indian deep tech stand apart at a time when every country is innovating and aiming to produce the next big thing in deep tech, Bethmangalkar believes the answer lies in the lower R&D costs in the country.
“India’s per capita income is lower but the quality of R&D, engineering, science is still very high. What that translates to is India’s advantage where we can deliver innovation at a much lower cost as compared to Silicon Valley.”
Bethmangalkar believes these are interesting times for deep tech innovation in India. For a venturing unit that’s invested in the sector from the beginning, their patience is finally looking to pay off.
“We’ve been here for the last 17 years and have seen the country’s growth in entrepreneurship – what it was back then, what it is now and going forward. It gives us an edge – and we’re excited by it.”
