Why hasn’t India made major strides in the deeptech space yet? The oft-quoted question recently gained steam when the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal, pulled up Indian startup founders for wasting their talent, time and capital on delivering groceries or making fancy ice cream brands rather than doing real-world innovation in the realm of deeptech.

While the minister’s concerns were genuine, the reality is that India’s deeptech sector is plagued with capital constraints and a risk-averse funding ecosystem. According to the Inc42 data, the deeptech sector was the least favoured investor destination in the first three months of 2025.

The sector, which houses robotics, frontier models in AI, semiconductor, EV infrastructure, next-gen healthcare, defence tech, aerospace, drones, etc., could only raise $84 Mn in 21 deals.

Compared to ecommerce and consumer services (quick commerce is a major part of this sector) sectors, which have raised $35.8 Bn and $14 Bn, respectively, since 2014, the Indian deeptech startups have only been able to raise $2 Bn since 2014. This is not even half of what Zomato has raised since its inception. For those wondering, the foodtech major has raised more than $5 Bn to date.

With such limited capital, India’s deeptech ambitions currently seem to be in a precarious state of affairs, especially when the creation of a sovereign large language model (LLM) forms the core of India’s GenAI vision.

This brings us to the most crucial part of the equation — What do investors want? Well, it is unfortunate, but only a handful of investors see Indic-language LLM as a good business proposition.

According to Inc42’s latest “The Pulse Of Tech Inc42’s Investor Survey, Q1 2025”, only 13% of the 75 Indian startup investors surveyed believe investing in startups working on building Indic-language LLMs is a good........

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