During the India visit of French President Emmanuel Macron last week, Hyderabad–based startup incubator T-Hub inked a strategic partnership with Hauts-de-France region to deepen Indo-French startup growth corridor. In an exclusive interaction with Fortune India, T-Hub CEO Kavikrut says T-Hub has been doing startup exchange programs and has tie-ups with other nations like the UK, Finland, and Israel. The incubator, which aims at providing launch pad to the innovators, is working with the partner nations in multiple areas like defence and deep tech, among others. Edited Excerpts:

Ashutosh Kumar: Kindly tell us about T-Hub’s partnerships with France. What synergies will this tie-up bring for the Indian startups and innovators?  

Kavikrut: T-Hub and France have a very old relationship. And it is not a conventional one. It is primarily to do with innovation. We started a couple of years ago. We do frequent startup exchange programmes between France and India. In the AI Impact Summit, there are four startups that have come with us through an organisation called LaFrenchTech. They underwent an India immersion programme to understand what's happening in India’s startup ecosystem. 

T-Hub and France have an organic connection. You must have heard of Station F. President Macron himself inaugurated it a couple of years ago. It is one of the largest startup campuses in the world. It is residential and a large part of it is based in an old train station. At T-Hub, we are also very lucky to have a physical manifestation. And, as a startup hub, we have a dedicated trade bureau of France sitting inside T-Hub. 

Question: What other tie-ups do you have?

Answer: So, we have similar startup exchange programmes with Finland, Israel, and the UK. We are the largest partner in India for Innovate UK. Innovate UK is very broad based.

Question: As a start up incubator, how do you differentiate from traditional industry bodies?

Answer: The traditional industrial bodies like trade organisations and the CIIs, Ficci, and Nasscoms of the world are not engineered currently to work with startups. They are amazing and they all have a startup focus. But we work with the start ups. And our job is to be the startup enabler and to ensure that we are startup native or founder native in our thinking. In over 10 years, Startup India has become a real thing. Right. It is a real choice of career. Even despite all of that if you are a founder and say, if you want to access Japan, you can't just take a flight and go. Or France, or anywhere else!

The reason you can go and sell in the US is because we have a very large diaspora. So, somebody will help you. At T-Hub, when we sign up with other enabling organisations, we facilitate both ways. A lot of things become easy for our founders.

What I have understood from my experience and everything that T-Hub has done and wants to do is that there are primarily three things. You give the innovators market, which is business, provide them some form of endorsement, and capital. 

Question: Could you elaborate on your partnerships with other nations, like the UK and Israel?

So, with Innovate UK, which I was telling you, we have an India market access programme.

We have run two cohorts now. Startups come from the UK and explore whether this market is meaningful for their products. The second example I will give you is Israel. Israel has an defence research organisation called DDRND and it has a defence attaché here and we are working on civilian use cases in India. So, this one is also a market exploration, but it is very specific to civilian use cases. We work with them through a cohort. We have done a six-month cohort of six startups and a 12-month cohort of five startups. These are deep-tech defence startups. So, eight such companies –- very deep tech companies -- have explored India with us.

Question: So what were the products in these cohorts?

Answer: Defence startups were mostly biotech sciences, materials sciences, military tools, not weapons. But tools, commodities, or consumables. I will give you an example. There is a synthetic blood startup as part of the first cohort. It was exploring whether synthetic blood can have a medical use case. They have patents.

Question: What about deep-tech startups in India. A lot has been said, but where does India stand.

Answer: I think it is still early. Beyond traditional industries, it is still early days, but early signs of success are visible. See on deep tech, the work been happening for the last decade plus in India. But the gestation period was long. Our mind share and voice share was busy with stuff that we relate to. 

So, I would break early traction primarily into four areas – aerospace, defence, biotech and life sciences, and the fourth is everything that is happening on industry or manufacturing –not only assembly line automation but hardcore IOT. Then there are material sciences, and battery chemistry etc in which there are a lot of early signs. Same with space and aerospace.