India has made significant progress in its innovation journey. Over the past decade, the country has built one of the world’s largest startup ecosystems with more than 200,000 recognised startups as of 2025 in various fields. The new-age entrepreneurs have redefined the domains of fintech, edtech, foodtech, healthtech, and many other sectors. But the next chapter of this journey will not be defined by scale alone; it will be defined by depth and the ability to solve genuinely complex and consequential problems.

Deeptech entrepreneurship, grounded in advanced science and engineering, is increasingly central to India’s ambition of building long-term economic and strategic capability. Unlike traditional startups that prioritise speed & scalability, deeptech ventures are not built for speed. They are built for problems that resist easy answers, and they take years of research, iteration, and patience before they are ready for the world.

India has been building its support systems for deep-tech in earnest. The government’s ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme is a significant step in this direction, aimed at providing long-tenor, low-interest financing to private-sector R&D in sunrise and strategic sectors.

More concretely, deeptech startups now have their own formal category under the Startup India framework—with recognition extended to 20 years from incorporation and a significantly higher revenue threshold for benefits. This is a meaningful acknowledgement that science-led ventures require longer runways than conventional startups. For engineering students and early-stage innovators, the signal is clear—ideas that begin with curiosity in a lab now have a policy framework built to support them through the long haul.

While policy creates the foundation, campuses remain the starting point. Institutions like IITs, NITs, and other leading engineering colleges are today becoming hubs of experimentation where early-stage ideas are born. Students are building prototypes, exploring interdisciplinary ideas, and working on technologies that go far beyond textbooks.

However, the journey from prototype to real-world deployment is met with numerous challenges, and many promising ideas remain confined to labs because they lack access to testing environments, industry exposure, and long-term funding. Similarly, for early-stage entrepreneurs, building a prototype is one milestone; transforming it into a reliable, deployable system and scaling it to a sustainable & viable business is another challenge entirely.

None of this happens in isolation. When industry works closely with academic institutions, bringing real use cases, validation environments, and honest feedback on what ‘working’ actually means, the quality of what gets built changes fundamentally. Academia brings the research depth and technical rigour; industry brings the operational reality check. The government holds the longer view, creating the policy frameworks and incentives that let both sides take risks they otherwise wouldn’t. The pipeline from idea to deployment depends on all three working in concert, not in sequence.

Today, the funding in deep-tech ideas/ventures has also undergone a gradual shift. Traditionally, deep-tech startups have struggled to attract early-stage investment due to longer and more uncertain returns. However, initiatives such as the Fund of Funds for Startups and emerging deep-tech focused capital pools are beginning to address these requirements and enable access to risk capital. The introduction of concessional financing models and long-tenor funding models is gaining real traction.

According to Tracxn, the deeptech sector in India has attracted nearly $10 billion in funding over the last decade, with $1.46 billion raised in 2025 alone, and momentum in 2026 is already running well ahead of last year. Patient capital is beginning to fund deeptech in India in a meaningful way.

But capital and policy only go so far. Deeptech innovation is inherently challenging—it involves long cycles of uncertainty and iteration before a product is ready for the real world. More often than not, the hardest part is not the technology itself but maintaining the conviction to keep going when results take longer than expected. What that demands from the ecosystem around a young founder—from their institution, their mentors, their early backers—is the willingness to value experimentation, interdisciplinary thinking, and long-term problem solving over short-term outcomes.

The ambition is already there. India is steadily building capabilities in quantum tech, semiconductors, AI, and climate technology—areas that will define global competitiveness for decades. These are not incremental improvements on what exists. They are bets on what India needs to build from scratch—and the generation now in our engineering colleges will determine whether those bets pay off.

The conditions are better than they have ever been—better policy, more patient capital, stronger institutional intent. What remains is the harder ingredient: people willing to work on genuinely difficult problems and stay with them long enough to matter. If the idea feels too complex, too uncertain, too ambitious—that is precisely where India needs you to begin.

(The author is co-founder and vice president – Engineering,  ideaForge Technology Ltd. Views are personal.)