For years, India’s best scientists left for the US. Now they are staying, and more of them are choosing startups over corporate labs. For Nicolas Sauvage, Founder and President of TDK Ventures, those two shifts are the biggest changes in Indian deeptech over the past five to 10 years.
“The best talent starts to go into the startups in deeptech, and they try things that they would not have tried 10 years or even five years ago,” Sauvage said in a fireside chat with Shivani Muthanna, Senior Director – Strategic Content & Video at YourStory, at TechSparks 2026.
TDK Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of Japanese electronics company TDK Corporation. Set up in Silicon Valley in 2019, it opened its Bengaluru innovation hub in 2023, its first office outside the US. India is its second largest market by number of investments, Sauvage said.
The ecosystem he is betting on is growing. India is home to more than 4,200 deeptech startups, which raised $2.3 billion in 2025, up 37% from the year before, according to a Nasscom–Zinnov report.
During the session titled ‘Global by design: What Indian deeptech needs to become globally iconic’, he laid out what Indian founders need to get right to build companies that compete globally, from picking a first customer and the right investors to planning for scale before it becomes expensive to do so.
Where India has the right to win
Speaking on investing in SpaceTech, Sauvage named the US, China, and India as the three countries where he would consider investing as a VC. Space is one area where he believes India has a clear advantage, built on decades of institutional investment through the Indian Space Research Organisation. The government’s space promotion agency, IN-SPACe, projects that India’s space economy will grow from $8.4 billion to $44 billion by 2033, raising its share of the global market from 2% to 8%.
TDK Ventures co-led a $20.5 million Series A in Bengaluru-based spacetech startup Ethereal Exploration Guild (The Guild), which is developing a fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle.
Sauvage also pointed to a shift in AI. The conversation, he said, has moved from tokens and compute to electrons and gigawatts, which means everything involved in delivering power to chips now matters. TDK Ventures invested in C2i Semiconductors, a Bengaluru startup founded in 2024 by former Texas Instruments engineers that builds power management technology for AI data centres. Germany’s Infineon Technologies announced the acquisition of C2i in August 2026 and completed it in October, about two years after the startup was founded.
Beyond individual sectors, Sauvage credited a cultural trait: jugaad, or resourcefulness under constraint.
“Think about the entrepreneurship journey. It means going from an idea with massive constraints and creating something that’s valuable and does a job. That sounds like jugaad to me,” he said.
That resourcefulness shows up in the numbers, he added. Capital efficiency among Indian portfolio companies is world class. “I’m from Europe, but don’t talk about Europe when we think about capital efficiency,” he said.
Let the first market shape the product
When asked what founders building from India for the world should think about first, Sauvage pointed to Exponent Energy. Founded in 2020 by former Ather Energy executives Arun Vinayak and Sanjay Byalal, the company offers 15-minute fast charging. In June 2026, TDK Ventures co-led a Rs 200 crore ($21.1 million) round in Exponent, taking the company’s total funding since 2020 to $65.7 million.
Exponent’s long-term goal was megawatt-scale fast charging for intercity buses. It could not start there. Instead, it began by supplying battery management systems (BMS) to three-wheeler makers, a fragmented market with more than 70 manufacturers at the time.
“There was no way a German startup would convince BMW to take their solution. No way a US startup would convince General Motors to take their BMS solution,” Sauvage said.
India’s fragmented market let Exponent deploy across many manufacturers in Bengaluru and beyond, giving it a base to build from.
Founders need superpowers, and so do their investors
Sauvage described founders as superheroes. Each needs a superpower: something they know or can do that no one else can. That is what draws investors in. But, like any superhero film, there are many battles before the end, and founders need allies.
“You want to make sure that the investors you pick as an entrepreneur bring the right superpower at the right time,” he said.
Corporate VCs can bring a go-to-market channel, an early anchor customer, a hard-to-access supplier, or help reducing scientific risk, depending on who they are. He urged founders to choose investors based on what they add that the cap table does not already have.
For TDK Ventures, that means drawing on TDK’s work in energy, sensing, passive components, and power supplies. Sauvage said electric motorcycle maker Ultraviolette now gets components typically reserved for TDK’s largest customers, while TDK is working with The Guild on future component requirements and roadmaps.
Alongside seeking venture-capital financial returns, he said, TDK Ventures looks for ways TDK’s capabilities, or “superpowers”, can accelerate and de-risk a founder’s journey towards building a globally significant company.
First principles over trade-offs
Sauvage traced several portfolio wins back to first-principles thinking. TDK Ventures invested in AI chip company Groq in 2020. During an interview with founder Jonathan Ross before investing, Sauvage noticed that every answer, from setting company values to hiring, firing, and designing the compiler, came back to first principles.
That approach produced a chip architecture designed around the compiler, which allowed for fully predictable, low-latency inference. Sauvage said he was convinced inference was the future before the ChatGPT moment, when he estimated the market for inference alone at more than $60 billion. In December 2025, NVIDIA signed a non-exclusive licensing deal for Groq’s technology, reportedly worth about $20 billion, and hired Ross and several members of his team.
He applied the same lens to engineering decisions that look like trade-offs. Ultraviolette, he said, uses first-principles engineering to pursue improvements in performance, weight and cost together. The company now sells its bikes in Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK, and other European markets, bringing its products into markets served by established manufacturers such as BMW. Ultraviolette recently raised $85 million in a round led by Yali Capital and TDK Ventures.
Patience and impatience at the same time
Deeptech founders, Sauvage said, need both. “Overnight success takes 10 years,” he said, noting that Groq took 10 years and SpaceX took 17. At the same time, founders need urgency and a sense of contribution to society.
Before investing, he looks for four things: a founder with a superpower, a category-defining product, a large enough market, and evidence the company can win one customer and then the next while staying capital-efficient. Markets worth $1 billion to $2 billion can be too small for the venture returns TDK Ventures seeks, he said, because the firm looks for each investment to have the potential to return the entire fund.
He cited SPAN, a Silicon Valley company led by Indian-origin founder Arch Rao. SPAN began by redesigning the home electrical panel, a product largely unchanged for a century.
As AI infrastructure demand surged, SPAN extended its power-management technology into distributed compute through partnerships, which Sauvage said changed the company’s trajectory.
Longer cycles also explain why India needs more corporate investors now, he argued. Using a roughly four-year journey to success in SaaS and fintech as an illustration, Sauvage described an ecosystem that can recycle entrepreneurial experience about 2.5 times a decade, as founders and employees carry what they have learned into new companies. A ten-year deeptech journey allows only one such cycle over the same period. Networks of repeat founders and alumni-founded businesses, like those associated with PayPal and SpaceX, therefore take longer to develop. Corporate investors can help bridge that gap with technical expertise, suppliers and customer relationships.
“I want global companies, corporates, and their corporate VCs to know this is the time to invest in India for deeptech,” he said.
Build for scale before it gets expensive
Sauvage emphasised thinking about scale and international expansion early, because shortcuts taken to win the first market in India can become expensive to reverse later.
When TDK Ventures met Ultraviolette, the team was already deliberate about Europe while focused on winning in India first, with customers riding its bikes as far as the Himalayas.
His advice to founders: find what is specific to India that a global customer would trust. India’s wide temperature range, for example, could favour energy storage that performs across extremes, such as sodium-ion or thermal batteries.
“Try to think about what makes you being in India a proof point that because you’re successful in India, you will win everywhere,” he said.
For Sauvage, India’s deeptech opportunity rests on more than talent. The founders most likely to build iconic companies are those who treat India as a starting point rather than a boundary, pick investors who fill specific gaps, and design for international markets before shortcuts become costly to undo. It is a long game that demands patience and impatience at once, and in his view, the moment for global capital to back it in India has arrived.
Source: YourStory
