Piper Serica Moves to Fix Deep Tech Startups’ Biggest Funding Gap

When Mumbai-based venture capital firm Piper Serica announced a new fund, it did not arrive at the deep tech party as a newcomer. With 30 investments already spread across space, semiconductors, advanced electronics, cybersecurity and defence, the firm has been building this thesis since October 2022, long before ‘deep tech’ became the funding world’s preferred buzzword.

The new ₹800-crore Bharat Tech Fund has a sharply defined mandate: to address what Piper Serica’s Director of Investments, Ajay Modi, describes as India’s most consequential funding gap. 

“Most of the capital is either in the very early stage, pre-seed, seed, pre-Series A, or there is very late-stage capital from the larger funds and private equity,” Modi says. “There is no real deep tech-focused Series A, Series B fund right now.”

He estimates the country requires roughly ₹25,000–₹30,000 crore as a dedicated venture pool for this segment alone.

Funds that would historically have written Series A and B cheques have shifted their attention to consumer tech, SaaS, AI and fintech, sectors that offer shorter commercialisation timelines. The result is a cohort of engineering-led startups stranded at the threshold of commercial scale, having completed the hard technical work but unable to raise the $3–5 million needed to cross it. The Bharat Tech Fund is designed to be that bridge.

The Commercialisation Thesis

The fund’s investment logic rests on a specific and often overlooked segment of the deep tech pipeline: companies that have already spent seven to 10 years building technology and are operating at Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) eight, nine or 10. These are not early-stage research bets; they are businesses with working products, initial customers and a clear path to revenue generation.

“I am not looking at companies that are very early, who will probably take another five years to go from Series A to Series B,” Modi says. “There are at least 10–15% of the roughly 8,000 deep tech companies in India, about 1,000 odd founders, who have done half the journey already. They are ready to commercialise.”

Modi highlights two portfolio companies that illustrate the thesis. Astrogate, a pioneer in laser communication and satellite technology, has spent a decade developing and has sold modules to entities including the European Space Agency and the Australian Space Agency. Xovian Aerospace is primed for its first commercial launch within nine months. Both are waiting for capital to operationalise what they have already built.

Modi is equally direct about how Piper Serica defines success for the new fund, deliberately decoupled from unicorn metrics.

“Success will be about how high-quality execution our portfolio founders can deliver, and as an outcome of that, how much value we can add to the nation in terms of import substitution and localisation,” he says. 

Domestic Capital and the Talent Imperative

Modi is frank about where he sees the real bottlenecks, and his answer is pointed. Despite frequent calls for more government support, he argues that policy infrastructure is broadly in place. The deep tech challenge, in his view, is primarily one of domestic capital mobilisation and the depth of the talent pipeline.

“It is really the domestic investors who have to wake up to the reality,” he says. His call to action is long-term: domestic family offices, HNIs and institutional investors need to increase their allocation, with the understanding that the sector will produce its own cohort of unicorns and decacorns.

On talent, the picture is similarly nuanced. India’s premier institutions, IISc Bangalore, IIT Madras, IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi, are producing world-class engineers, he stresses. But the country’s decades-long orientation towards software has left a gap in hardware engineering capability. “Deep tech is a meaningfully large hardware ecosystem, and it requires the right training,” Modi says. 

The solution, he argues, is to extend quality technical grooming to tier-two institutes, building a supply base that can sustain the sector’s hardware-intensive ambitions.

Import Substitution as Industrial Strategy

The macroeconomic context animating the Bharat Tech Fund is as much geopolitical as financial. Four years of global supply chain disruptions have forced every major economy to reassess its dependence on concentrated manufacturing bases, most acutely in semiconductors, where India remains heavily reliant on China and Taiwan.

“If I just look at semiconductor, advanced electronics, space, defence and fintech, we are talking about $700–$800 billion of latent demand that is currently being served by either broken technologies or by imported products,” Modi says. 

Capturing even a fraction of this through domestic innovation yields compounding returns, not just for the companies involved but also for India's current account and industrial base.

Modi compares the potential growth of advanced electronics, semiconductors, and defence hardware to that of the Indian auto sector, which evolved from fully assembled imports to a $300 billion industry over 40 years with the right supporting infrastructure.

Building Towards Exit

One persistent criticism of Indian deep tech investing has been the lack of large-scale exits, a concern that Modi forcefully pushes back against. He points to listed engineering companies, Astra Microwave in radar technology, Centum Technologies and ideaForge in drones, as evidence that founders who combine technical depth with manufacturing capability and distribution have found routes to public markets.

The more significant exit pathway he identifies is strategic acquisition by listed engineering incumbents. “I know most of these engineering companies on the listed side, and they are very open to acquisition if someone is building good technology,” he says. He cites Zen Technologies, which has acquired multiple deep tech startups, including motor-technology company Vector Techniques, as proof of concept. 

For Piper Serica, the immediate year ahead is focused on three priorities: closing the Bharat Tech Fund, deploying capital, and generating returns from the firm’s first fund. 

Modi believes that India's future technology leaders will emerge from factories and labs, where engineers, after years of hard work, need new investors to bring their innovations to market.