Trending in Indian Deep-Tech

Imagine building an AI model that needs thousands of powerful chips. You have the engineers, the data and the customers, but there is one problem: almost everyone wants computing power from the same company. That company is Nvidia. Its GPUs have powered the AI boom, helping companies train large language models and run AI applications. But the industry is beginning to explore other options. On October 27, 2026, The Information reported that OpenAI plans to purchase Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). On the same day, Google and Oracle announced a partnership to bring TPUs to Oracle Cloud from 2027. For Google, this is an opportunity to turn its custom-built chips into a much bigger business. For Nvidia, it means something else: its biggest customers are exploring alternatives. And the competition is no longer just about who makes the fastest chip. A GPU and a TPU can both accelerate AI workloads, but they approach the job differently.

IBM says AI-enabled breaches jumped 56% in a year, and the Indian version of that statistic is a 58-year-old in Pune, a 76-year-old in Borivali, and a payments system fast enough to move money before anyone has asked “wait, is this real?” In early 2026, a 58-year-old businessman in Pune was scrolling through Instagram when an ad showed Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman promising exceptionally high returns on an investment platform. Few faces say “trust me with your savings” as convincingly as the person who presents the Union Budget, so he clicked, handed over his Aadhaar and other documents for “verification,” and soon found himself on Telegram with a “relationship manager” who helped him open a trading account. According to the complaint reported by Pune Pulse, he made 36 transactions between 2 June and 23 July 2026 and lost ₹1.07 crore, and the video that started it all was AI-generated. If that sounds like one unlucky man, hold that thought while we look at the number behind this story.

The state’s defence corridor spent years collecting MoUs. Now it has a missile line, an ammunition plant and a firing range. We checked who is actually producing what. In April 2021, ThePrint asked the corridor’s senior defence advisor how things were going. Colonel (retd.) K.S. Tyagi replied: “We are still evolving.” It is the most honest sentence a project office has ever produced, and it deserves a plaque. Fast forward to 18 October 2025. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath flagged off the first batch of BrahMos missiles from Lucknow. Same corridor, same state, and a very different sentence: “If a foreign company or country refuses to supply a spare part, production comes to a halt.” So what changed between “still evolving” and “flagged off”? Let’s go node by node. Announced in the 2018 Union Budget, the Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor (UPDIC) has six nodes: Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi, Aligarh, Agra and Chitrakoot.

Imagine a drone approaching a sensitive military installation. It may be small and inexpensive, but detecting it, identifying its intent and stopping it can require an entire network of sensors and defence systems. As Walter White says in Breaking Bad , “I’m not in danger. I am the danger.” In drone warfare, the problem is that the threat may cost relatively little, while the response can be considerably more expensive. India’s counter-drone industry is working to change that equation. DRDO, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) , established defence manufacturers and startups are developing indigenous technologies to detect, disrupt and neutralise hostile drones. The challenge is no longer simply to shoot one down. It is to know what is approaching, decide how dangerous it is and respond in time. Before a drone can be stopped, it has to be found. Different technologies help identify different aspects of the threat: Radar: Detects and tracks aerial objects.

Think about the last message you sent before opening this article, the one you probably typed with your thumbs while half-watching something else, and notice that the thought behind it had already finished forming in your head by the time your fingers had barely started moving, which means every text, every email, and every voice note you have ever produced has been a small act of translation in which something instant and wordless is squeezed through muscles, keyboards, and the clumsy machinery of grammar before anyone else can receive it, a toll so tiny and so constant that you have almost certainly stopped noticing you pay it. Now imagine that the toll were suddenly raised to infinity, that your mind were fully awake and every sentence were still arriving in it exactly as before, but that the muscles you rely on to carry those sentences out into the world had simply stopped answering, which is the situation of people living with ALS, known in Australia as motor neurone disease, and which is why one particular tweet that appeared in 2022 deserves far more attention than its size would suggest.

“ India can build solar parks, wind farms and ambitious renewable-energy targets. But when the electricity has nowhere to go, even the sun can’t save the situation.” Picture a solar farm on a bright afternoon. Panels are doing their job. The sun is cooperating. Electricity is being generated, and somewhere, a spreadsheet is celebrating another milestone in India’s clean-energy transition. Then the grid hits a bottleneck. The electricity cannot be transmitted where it is needed, or the system cannot absorb all the power being generated at that moment. Some renewable energy may have to be curtailed. Congratulations. You have successfully generated clean electricity that cannot be fully used. “It’s done bro . Except it isn’t.” Because generating electricity is only half the job. The other half is getting it to the people, factories and cities that need it, and making sure it is available when they need it. That is the problem India’s Green Energy Corridor Phase III is trying to solve.

“Avengers, assemble!” Captain America last said it in Avengers: Endgame when the heroes arrived for their final battle. The film returned to theatres last month, and looking at Startup Policy Forum’s DeepVerse announcement, I could almost imagine someone leaving the cinema with an idea for Indian deeptech. SPF has launched DeepVerse , a Centre for DeepTech Innovation , with an 18-member advisory board of investors, founders, policymakers, academics and global-tech leaders. If SPF is new to you, it is an industry alliance representing more than 75 Indian tech companies with a combined valuation of over $100 billion . It helps founders bring their problems to the people shaping the rules they work under. It was founded by Shweta Rajpal Kohli , a former journalist who later led public-policy work at Sequoia Capital India, Salesforce and Uber. She now heads SPF as its president and CEO. For DeepVerse, she has brought together quite a team.

Army officers are not known for gushing. Commendation letters from commanding officers tend to read like ration receipts: correct, procedural, and about as warm as a Siachen morning. So when a Colonel of the Indian Army sat down on August 14 this year and personally wrote to a drone company that “such indigenous initiatives are vital for strengthening self-reliance” and that the team’s work “inspires confidence that Indian industry can rise to meet the most demanding operational challenges,” it was worth asking who on earth had impressed an infantry Colonel enough to pick up a pen. The answer is a 20-inch quadcopter called the Vijay-Z1 , built by a company that did not exist eighteen months ago. Zenith Unmanned Systems was incorporated in April 2025. The Vijay-Z1 project itself started even later, in August 2025, which in drone-industry years is roughly the gestation period of a fruit fly. And yet by mid-August 2026, the same drone was flying at 12,000 feet for one hour and twenty minutes, impressive enough to earn that letter, and then, about a week later, doing something arguably harder.

For most of independent India’s history, the question was simple: What does the Indian military need, and who can sell it to us? The answer usually came from somewhere else. Fighter jets from France and Russia. Engines from other nations. Radars, missiles, artillery weapons, and an extensive array of parts procured from foreign firms. India emerged as one of the largest importers of major weapons across the globe. But the question is shifting gears. In fiscal year 2025-26, India exported its military equipment for the sum of ₹38,424 crore, which marks a growth of 62.66% from ₹23,622 crore in the previous fiscal year. Presently, the country exports its military equipment to over 80 countries, while the Indian military exporters increased from 128 to 145 in one year. Seems like the end of a good story, but this might just be the start of a tougher one. The Sub-System Opportunity: When India Stopped Being Just the Buyer India’s defence export number would have looked almost absurd a decade ago.

Somewhere in your house sits a phone that stopped holding charge two years ago, a swollen laptop battery, or a power bank that quietly expired during the pandemic. You know it should be recycled. You also know it is still there, because “recycle” has always felt like a polite suggestion rather than a destination. On September 9, 2026, roughly 8,000 kilometres away in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland South province, a convoy left ten spodumene-bearing mining blocks spanning 1,100 hectares. It carried the first tranche of lithium ore an Indian company had ever mined overseas. The company was Lohum . The ore, estimated at 30 to 40 million tonnes in the ground and valued at roughly $7 billion at current prices, marked the start of something India had rarely attempted: going to the source instead of waiting for someone else to sell the raw material. Two ends of one story. A forgotten battery in Noida.

Every AI answer, every UPI payment, every missile guidance system, and every car’s anti-lock brake depends on the same tiny object: a semiconductor chip, a wafer of silicon etched with billions of microscopic switches that turn electricity into computation. For most of the last seventy years, that object was invisible infrastructure, nobody outside an engineering department thought about where their phone’s chip came from. Then 2020 happened. A pandemic-driven supply crunch left carmakers unable to ship vehicles for want of a $2 chip , US-China tensions turned chip export controls into a geopolitical weapon, and governments worldwide woke up to the fact that whoever controls chip supply controls the physical foundation of every other technology, from smartphones to fighter jets. India, which had spent decades treating semiconductors as somebody else’s business, is now trying to compress a multi-decade catch-up into about five years. What Chips Actually Do Strip away the geopolitics and a chip’s job is simple: it’s a piece of silicon carrying an electronic circuit that processes and stores information, acting as the “brain” of every electronic device.

Elon Musk’s Indian Expansion Has Arrived. The Bureaucracy, Apparently, Has Not Been Briefed. I was sitting on my couch, casually scrolling through the Venice Film Festival highlights, fully expecting the usual cinematic high-browing. Instead, I found myself reading about Ashley St. Clair dropping absolute conversational thermonukes about Elon Musk in Alex Gibney’s new four-hour documentary, Musk . Now, look. I knew Elon was busy. The man is simultaneously managing space exploration and behaving like an online Godfather on X. According to St. Clair, Musk once texted her that he wanted a “legion of children before the civil war” . She also alleged that his team offered her a $40 million NDA concerning their child, which she declined. Naturally, the story generated plenty of internet drama: pronatalism, apocalypse predictions and the world’s richest man trying to keep an intensely personal story private. Whatever one makes of it, Musk clearly seems comfortable thinking in unusually large numbers, whether we are talking about children, companies or rockets.

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.

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.