Deep-tech firms hail draft policy, flag friction points

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Deep-tech industry participants, including founders, investors and advisors ET spoke to on Tuesday, expressed confidence in a draft deep-tech startup policy recommendations to further innovation and funding into the sector, while some also raised questions on its effectiveness. Open for public consultation and released on Monday, the recommendations are spread across nine themes including access to funding and strengthening the intellectual property regime. «We welcome the government putting a dedicated focus on deep-tech startups and committing significant time and resources to the cause.

We are sure this policy will take the Indian deep-tech startup ecosystem to the global scale,» Arpit Agarwal, investment partner, Blume Ventures told ET. «If we need to be a global industrial powerhouse in the next ten years, it is important for us to have all stakeholders come together and build an ecosystem for it. We need value-additive manufacturing and industries in India,» Vishesh Rajaram, founding partner at Speciale Invest said.

The recommendations included setting up a common grant framework to be established across government ministries — a grant of minimum ₹2 crore at proof of concept stage and a minimum ₹3 crore grant at tested prototype stage. «We have seen examples of match equity model work in other parts of the world (including Israel) where larger grants could be coupled with matching equity capital from financial investors. This will encourage fiscal prudence as well as commercial focus,» Rajaram said.

Kaushik Mudda, founder and CEO of Ethereal Machines, said that a similar corpus would have immensely benefited the firm in its early days. «Creating a policy for promotion of deep-tech startups is a good idea. The