The Indian energy transition will be built, not bought.

What the team has actually catalyzed.

Across IIMA Ventures, Infuse Ventures, Bharat Innovation Fund, ADB Ventures, and the Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund. The portfolio is the evidence that this thesis is operational.

Three numbers that frame the decade

By 2030, India will require approximately 350 GWh of annual cell demand. India today produces less than five percent of that domestically. The PLI cell scheme awarded 40 GWh to Reliance, Ola, Hyundai, and Rajesh Exports - only Ola has commissioned material capacity, at 1.4 GWh. The gap between awarded and operational capacity is the most under-appreciated capex opportunity in Indian deep-tech.

By 2030, India is targeted to produce 5 million metric tonnes per year of green hydrogen under the National Hydrogen Mission, with a ₹19,744 crore outlay. Five MMT requires 60–100 GW of dedicated renewables, 50–60 GW of electrolyzer capacity, and a domestic supply chain for membranes, catalysts, and storage that India does not yet have.

By 2030, on current trajectory, India's annual critical-mineral import bill will exceed ₹1.6 lakh crore. The National Critical Minerals Mission has a ₹34,300 crore outlay structured to address this - through KABIL acquisitions, geological survey acceleration, and explicit incentives for recyclers, refiners, and substitutes.

What the global story tells us not to repeat

The American and European cleantech booms of the past five years produced extraordinary technical victories - QuantumScape's solid-state separators, Form Energy's iron-air batteries, Electric Hydrogen's 100MW HYPRPlant - and extraordinary capital destruction. Northvolt's near-collapse in 2024 despite USD 13.8B raised, Zymergen's failure, Ginkgo Bioworks' deep cost-cutting in 2025: the pattern is consistent. Capex-heavy companies without disciplined yield improvement and locked-in offtake do not survive.

We apply this lesson directly to our Indian underwriting. We do not invest in cell or electrolyzer scale-up rounds without anchor offtake from a PSU, large industrial buyer, or sovereign mandate. Log9 Materials, an Indian battery startup that filed for insolvency in 2025 after raising more than USD 60M, is the local version of the same lesson.

Home-grown first; imported IP as the second, untapped channel

The primary category of climate innovation we underwrite is home-grown - technology developed inside Indian research labs, by Indian-origin researchers and founders, and then commercialised and scaled inside India end-to-end. This is where the largest opportunity sits and where the bulk of our capital goes. The home-grown channel is no longer a thin pipeline of niche experiments; it is a deep funnel of serious science coming out of IITs, IISc, CSIR labs, and BIRAC- and DST-backed incubators, and it is increasingly populated by founders with prior deep operating experience.

Ather Energy is the canonical example. The powertrain, the battery pack, the charging network, the connected software stack, and the manufacturing line were all designed and built inside India by an Indian founding team out of IIT Madras, from first principles, for Indian road and climate conditions - not imported and adapted. Euler Motors, in our portfolio, is the same playbook applied to commercial three-wheeler logistics: Indian-designed powertrains, battery packs, fleet software, and customer financing, now anchored by a Hero MotoCorp strategic partnership. What is genuinely new about this channel is that successful Indian operators are coming back to start companies in materially harder categories than their first venture. The Euler founding team is exactly this pattern - prior operating experience, willingness to take on hardware, battery chemistry, manufacturing, and customer financing simultaneously, and the patience to do it over a decade. We expect the next five years of climate founders to be disproportionately drawn from this pool: people who have already shipped a hard product and are choosing to take on a harder one - in batteries, electrolyzers, materials, water, and grid software.

The second channel - currently under-tapped - is technology imported from foreign research labs and commercialised inside India by founders who recognise that Indian cost, scale, and demand make the unit economics work where they do not in the country of origin. The upstream is research groups at MIT, Stanford, ETH Zurich, Imperial, the Max Planck Institutes, Helmholtz, KAIST, NUS, NTU, and similar global universities. This channel is structurally underexploited today; we expect it to grow significantly over the next decade.

Proklean Technologies, already in our book, is the working example for the imported-IP channel. The founding scientist picked up a probiotic-fermentation platform originally developed in US laboratories and adapted it to industrial surfactants and process chemicals for the Indian textile, leather, paper, and detergent industries - sectors with global scale, heavy effluent loads, and price sensitivity that the original IP holders were not set up to serve. Proklean then built on top of the upstream science with formulation depth, customer engineering against Indian process conditions, and a Tamil Nadu manufacturing footprint that did not exist around the original platform. The pattern is the point - imported core IP, Indian-built commercialisation. The next decade will produce many more Proklean-shaped companies across green chemistry, sustainable materials, electrochemistry, and bio-manufacturing.

We index toward both channels, but the bulk of our sourcing comes from the home-grown side - that is where the depth, the long-cycle conviction, and the operator network sit. We also maintain working relationships with the tech-transfer offices, institute presidents, and diaspora researcher networks that control the foreign-IP upstream, so the second channel is open whenever a genuine breakthrough warrants an Indian commercialisation play.

The five sub-themes we actively invest in

Storage and battery chemistry. Cathode active material domestication, silicon-anode integration, sodium-ion formats for Indian commercial vehicles, hydrometallurgical refining, vanadium-redox flow batteries for grid-scale storage, and AI-driven battery management software.

Electric mobility and supporting infrastructure. Commercial vehicles are India's distinctive contribution to the global EV story. Beyond Euler, we look at fleet operators with credible unit economics, charging-as-a-service, EV financing, battery-swap networks, and EV component localisation.

Green hydrogen and downstream chemistry. The hardest of the sub-themes, underwritten cautiously. We are most interested in the electrolyzer cost curve and in downstream - ammonia cracking, stationary fuel cells, methanation, point-source carbon capture, and mineralisation routes.

Industrial decarbonisation and bio-manufacturing. Where chemistry and biology converge - methane-to-protein (String Bio), methane-to-chemicals, macroalgae (Sea6 Energy), insect protein, bio-based specialty chemicals (Proklean lineage), PCMs (TESSOL lineage), and industrial AI for energy efficiency.

Climate finance, carbon accounting, and adaptation. India's adaptation infrastructure - parametric insurance, climate-resilient seed and breed stock, monsoon prediction software, rural-energy access financing - is structurally underbuilt and structurally important.

Climate categories adjacent to energy

Energy is the largest single chapter of climate, but it is not the only one. The Indian climate stack we actively invest in extends well beyond cells, cars, and hydrogen - into the chemistry, materials, water, food, and adaptation layers where India has comparable structural advantages and where the global capital base is even less crowded.

Green and bio-based chemicals. India is the world's third-largest chemicals producer and one of its dirtiest. The opportunity to displace fossil-derived industrial chemicals with bio-based, electrochemical, and catalysed alternatives is structural - replacing surfactants, solvents, dyes, and intermediates that go into textiles, leather, pharma, and packaging. Proklean (probiotic green chemistry, exited at ~4× to strategic), String Bio (methane-to-chemicals), and a new generation of precision-fermentation companies are the template. We expect bio-based specialty chemicals and electrochemical synthesis to be among the most underwriteable categories of the next five years.

Sustainable materials and the heavy-industry transition. Low-carbon cement (calcined clay, geopolymers, supplementary cementitious materials), green steel (hydrogen-direct-reduced iron pilots at Tata, JSW, and AMNS), bio-based and recycled plastics, mass timber and engineered wood for construction, and high-performance insulation (Dashamlabs' silica-aerogel lineage). NoPo Nanotechnologies' SWCNT-in-concrete application - one tonne of single-walled carbon nanotubes abates an estimated 840 tonnes of lifetime CO₂ in cement - sits squarely in this category and demonstrates how materials science can deliver climate value at industrial scale.

Water, food, and adaptation. Indian climate exposure is not symmetric - the country sits on the front line of monsoon volatility, heat stress, and water-supply disruption. Investible categories include desalination and zero-liquid-discharge water tech, parametric insurance and climate-resilient seed and breed stock, alternative proteins (Sea6 Energy on macroalgae, String Bio on microbial protein, insect-protein platforms), precision agriculture and AI-agronomy at smallholder scale, and the cold-chain decarbonisation that PCMs and thermal-storage companies like TESSOL are operationalising.

Circular economy and resource recovery. Battery recycling (anchored by the ₹1,500 crore promotion scheme), plastics and e-waste recovery, textile-fibre recycling, construction-debris reuse, and critical-mineral recovery from end-of-life industrial waste. These categories are systematically underfunded relative to upstream energy and, in aggregate, represent the largest 'climate beyond energy' venture opportunity in India today.

Where we will not invest

Pure-play residential rooftop solar installers - unit economics have compressed below venture returns. Investible distributed solar is now financing, not installation.

Domestic solar PV module manufacturing pure-plays - dominated at scale by Tata, Waaree, Premier, Goldi, and Adani; thin margins; not science differentiation.

Clinical-stage carbon-removal credit speculation - fragmented market and nascent regulatory pathway.

Series B and later in unprofitable hardware without anchor offtake or strategic operator co-invest. The Log9 precedent and the Northvolt cautionary tale make this discipline non-negotiable.

Why full-stack wins in Indian energy

The Indian energy buyer pays for outcomes - kilowatt-hours delivered, tonnes of cooling provided, tonnes of CO₂ avoided - not for the box that produces them. Pure-technology plays sell to a thin layer of OEMs and integrators who then capture most of the downstream value. Full-stack operators - companies that own design, deployment, financing, and ongoing service - capture the customer relationship and the recurring economics.

The strongest examples are already in market. Smart Joules sells cooling-as-a-service to industrial and commercial customers; the building gets cooled, they own the chillers and the energy contract. Fourth Partner Energy sells solar-as-a-service to C&I customers under 25-year PPAs and owns the assets. SUN Mobility and BatterySmart run battery-swap networks where the rider pays per swap, not for the battery. These are not technology companies that happen to do operations - they are operating companies built around a technology core, and their unit economics are dramatically better than the equivalent pure-product play.

Across our energy book we index toward this model. The 30-40% Indian cost advantage on equipment is amplified by the additional 30-40% margin that recurring service and financing layers attach. Founders who plan from day one to own the full stack - manufacturing, deployment, O&M, financing, and the customer relationship - survive the long capex cycles in a way pure-hardware exits cannot.