Trending in Indian Deep-Tech

Transformers, Iron Man and Doraemon. They all have something in common! All of them show us technology that interacts with us like any other human and have certain capabilities that can beat the average human being at most of the tasks. Ok, let’s simply call them robots. Even last year such things felt like a distant dream. Though most of us heard news of rapid investments in this technology, having such entities around you still felt an event of the future. But today we have videos of robots breaking Usain Bolt’s world record in China, assembling factory parts relentlessly, dancing at an inauguration event of a shop in Kerala and yes, participating as a contestant in India’s Got Latent! There are multiple companies around the globe working to create robots that solve our day-to-day problems, but today I want to talk about a company which has created a massive disruption in this industry globally and disclosed a $100M annual revenue run rate, only 10 months after their first commercial deployment.

In 1998, in a village called Aldur in Karnataka’s Chikkamagaluru district, a boy grew up without internet access until the eighth grade. His only window into space was a stack of encyclopedias his father brought home. Twenty-eight years later, that boy “Awais Ahmed” runs a company that operates six satellites in low Earth orbit, holds contracts with NASA and the US National Reconnaissance Office, and has just raised the largest funding round any Indian space-tech company has ever closed. The company is Pixxel. And its story is, improbably, becoming one of the clearest lenses through which to understand what India’s opening of its space sector to private players actually looks like in practice, not as policy language, but as hardware in orbit. Every satellite camera humans have flown for decades has captured images the way a human eye does: red, green, blue, maybe a couple of infrared bands bolted on. That’s enough to see that a field is green or brown, that a river has flooded, that a building exists.

Earlier, drones had a fairly respectable and harmless place in my imagination. They appeared at weddings, hovered over the bride and groom, and produced cinematic videos that nobody except the couple watched more than once. Slightly irritating? Yes. A national security problem? Not really. Then, at around 1:40 a.m. on 27 June 2021, that understanding flew over the wall of Jammu Air Force Station. Two explosives, believed to have been delivered by drones, detonated minutes apart. One tore through the roof of a building while the other exploded in an open area. Two Air Force personnel suffered minor injuries. By military standards, the physical damage was small. But India had just witnessed its first reported drone attack on a military installation. A machine associated with marriage reels had entered modern warfare! That is where our story begins: If stopping one cheap drone was difficult, what happens when the sky sends fifty?

I was halfway through trying to distract myself from being left on read when a notification hit. I sighed in relief, expecting a reply, but the notification read: Airbound just raised $37 million. Greenoaks led it. DoorDash showed up. Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, the usual suspects who bet on software that talks to other software. This time they threw money at a 21-year-old who started building drones at 15 because the pandemic was boring and origami dragons weren’t ambitious enough. It is easy to skim the headline, shrug off “drone delivery” as predictable tech news, and miss the point entirely. But being curious and desperate to distract myself again, I went to the website and read the manifesto. People who get instant replies might not have done that, ig (ngl I’m lowkey jealous). Coming Back to Airbound Naman Pushp is not selling faster packages. He is selling the quiet death of compromise.

Looksmaxxing is slowly becoming the new buzzword in town. People are going to gyms, running half marathons, doing pilates and yoga to become a fitter and healthier version of themselves. It’s a good thing, isn’t it? Though the trend is more pronounced in Bangalore, as someone spread the rumour that VCs now take into account your face card to decide how much money they would be pouring on you. I was not moved much by this trend until recently, while swiping profiles on my Hinge account, I noticed an eerie pattern. Every third girl was mentioning a ‘fitness enthusiast’ as their preferred partner. Feeling the gravity of the situation, I went out to my nearest gym and took their 6-month membership. Now, it’s 3 months into the gym I can confidently say that I was not made for all this stuff. I have been seeing the transformation reels of various people, but nothing looked like a possible reality for me.

Last summer, my air conditioner stopped cooling on what felt like the hottest afternoon of the year. The technician opened the outdoor unit, stared at it for ten seconds and announced, “Compressor gaya hai.” I nodded seriously, as educated people often do when they understand absolutely nothing but do not want the repairman to know. Until then, I had never really thought about what a compressor actually was. The compressor is actually the machine’s. It squeezes the refrigerant, raises its pressure and keeps it moving through the system so that heat can be carried from inside your room to the outside world. The fan moves air; the compressor moves heat. Without it, your expensive AC is just a large white box making unwanted noises. But the compressor hiding inside our ACs (I have a window AC) also hides a much bigger story. India sold roughly 12 to 14 million room air conditioners in 2025.

How Moonrider eliminated backbreaking vibration, slashed fuel bills to ₹80 an acre, and built a tractor for the whole family.

Yesterday I was token-maxxing my Claude Pro subscription to make a website for one of my projects. During the conversation, I noticed Claude repeatedly losing the context of the project and giving contradictory answers to many of my questions. Yes, I had implemented all the hardcore advice of X tech gurus! The Claude md file, prompt architecture, and skills were all in place.

“How Ben & Jerry’s Makes Nearly One Million Pints A Day.” This was the title of a YouTube video by Business Insider with 4.5 million views. If you read the comment section, most viewers were obsessed with the human story: how co-founder Ben Cohen has severe Anosmia (he has almost no sense of smell or taste and relies entirely on “mouthfeel”), yet built a global dessert empire. Others joked about the ice cream being so addictively engineered it should be classified alongside controlled substances.

Let me tell you a story. There once lived two friends wealth and knowledge on a small island. Both went to school together, played together and did their homework together too. The whole village gave an example of their friendship. Whenever one of them went missing at any large village gathering, the people would say, “You look incomplete without the other.” Their childhood went like this, slow and happy. But soon they turned adults and started going to college.

The air was tense. People were looking at cluttered sheets of paper for answers, some were googling and using claude but none was able to find one. AC was working at 22 degree celsius, yet you could see people sweating, because their leader wanted an answer as soon as possible.

I was watching Captain America: Civil War yesterday and the airport fight had just ended. I was watching that movie for the third time because I loved its plot. Two people who started together with a common mission eventually split up and start fighting like the worst of enemies. While the movie progressed, owing to my low attention span, I opened X and found this:

Believe me or not, opening and closing of a lot of things have been the center of debates and fights this year. First and foremost which comes to everyone’s mind is of course….Mr. President’s mouth.

Meta dropped $900 million on CRED. Kunal Shah is now running WhatsApp. Everyone’s calling it a masterstroke. I’m not sure anyone has actually looked at the math.

The year is 2040, and I am sitting in a park outside my small cottage somewhere in Uttarakhand, living with my wife and one dog and living off the wealth we created while side hustling in our 20s.

How a Missing AI Model Turned Into a Lesson on Why India Needs Sovereign Intelligence

India is building the kitchen. China still owns the spice rack. The Quad just broke ground on a very expensive alternative.