The next frontier for the country’s entrepreneurial landscape would be to foster industries built on intellectual property which can be addressed over the next two decades, Anandan said during a fireside chat with Deepak Dara of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan at the Indian Venture and Alternate Capital Association (IVCA) event in Mumbai.
“The one thing that I would love to see more is technical founders, deeply technical founders across spaces. As I said, eight of our 13 companies have PhDs, but the reality is we don’t have enough deeply technical founders starting up,” he said.
As a part of the ninth cohort of Surge, its scaling program for early-stage startups, Peak XV Partners has chosen 13 ventures with a particular focus on deeptech, AI, advanced manufacturing and quantum computing.
It has directed investments toward companies like Mindgrove and InCore within the semiconductor sector, Newtrace in the realm of green hydrogen, and Digantara in the field of space technology.
In areas like AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, energy transition, having more deeply technical founders starting up is crucial and the country should perceive this as an opportunity rather than a problem, Anandan added.
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Highlighting the importance of doubling down on investments in Indian universities, he stressed the establishment of more research centres and the increase of PhD holders in the country.“We’ve got to double down and triple down on our universities, have many more PhDs, and have many more research centers established and so on,” he said.
While acknowledging India’s current prowess in areas such as fintech and transactional commerce, he suggested that the nation is still a few years away from achieving similar excellence in software, developer tools, and related domains.
Also, he said, initial public offering (IPO) markets have become very interesting now, adding that he was astonished by the profitability prospects for many of his collective portfolio companies.