Union Commerce & Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, during Fortune India’s ‘India’s Best CEOs 2025’ event on Monday, said Indian companies must pool ‘Swadeshi (domestic) capital’ in a big way to promote Indian startups. Goyal said he has a complaint about billionaires in India, that the Indian domestic capital is not coming sufficiently to support Indian startups. “I do wish to see Indian companies, Swadeshi capital, coming in a big way to promote the startups, because there's tremendous potential,” he said.

During a fireside chat with Shashwat Goenka, Vice Chairman, RP–Sanjiv Goenka Group, the Union minister was asked about his thoughts on the startup ecosystem in India, and the next steps the country needs to take to ensure that it scales globally, especially in sectors such as deep-tech, defence, AI, and advanced electronics.

Also, he said sadly, many Indian startups sell out a large part of their equity ownership at an abysmally low price when they need their first seed capital or early-stage funding. Goyal appealed to big business leaders present at the Fortune India Best CEOs event in Mumbai to look at more domestic pools of capital supporting startups.

“The sharks out there, I even probably criticised Shark Tank and got a beating for that too, just tend to kill these ideas or buy them out very cheap.” 

He said the government just promised tranche two of the Rs 10,000 crore startup fund of funds, and that the entire fund is being allocated to deep-tech startups. “There's enough capital for other industries in the marketplace. Deep techs do have difficulty because the horizon is very long. Success ratios may not be very good.”

Goyal expressed hopes that India could do what Silicon Valley did with its innovation ecosystem. “Supplemented with Rs 1 lakh crore, we just announced in the Research, Development and Innovation Fund, we can do wonders in India. Our talent is second to none.”

He said he sees no reason why Indian startups, if supported by big business houses through pooled capital, couldn’t achieve that. He opined that family offices’ focusing on startup investments is not enough, as they don’t take “big risks”. “… very often I'm told there are family offices which do these things. Family offices are not going to take big risks. We need to have pooled capital, domestic capital, supplementing the money the government puts up.”

He stressed that India could be a big innovation hub. “Innovation in India can be done at one-fifth, one-sixth the cost of what happens in Switzerland or America.”

The Union Minister said his earlier comments about the Indian startup ecosystem at the Startup Mahakumbh 2025 in New Delhi earlier this year were taken out of context. Goyal said his comments were a wake-up call as he called for India to move over to deep-tech innovation. “Since that day, wherever I go, on a flight, in a public program, two or three youngsters come up to me and thank me for my comments. It was kind of a wake-up call. India needs to move over into high tech, into innovation, and encourage the deep tech startups.”

At Startup Mahakumbh 2025 in April this year, Goyal had called for a shift toward "value-adding" sectors, noting that India has only ~1,000 deep-tech startups—a "disturbing" gap compared to China’s focus on semiconductors and AI. "We need to think global and prioritise long-term sustainability over short-term wealth creation," he had said.

Fortune India’s Best CEOs event saw the presence of the who’s who of the business world, from C Vijayakumar, Managing Director & CEO, HCL Technologies Ltd, to K.V. Kamath, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Jio Financial Services, among others. The leaders discussed several key issues, including ‘The Future of IT Companies in the GenAI Age’ and leadership amid turbulent times.