“In a decade we will realize most of the deeptech is a grift,” Maini wrote, adding that quick services and quick commerce companies will do more to drive the economy. The remark, a reply to a post by AI startup Neosapien CEO Dhananjay Yadav, drew heavy reactions on X.
Yadav had written that his X feed was full of househelp startups burning enormous amounts of capital to capture market share. Meanwhile, he said, he knows several deep-tech startups that generate significantly more revenue with far less burn yet struggle to raise even a fraction of that money.
“To me, this is one of the biggest problems with our ecosystem. We say we want to build products in India for the world, but we invest far less in the future than the US does,” he wrote.
Deedy Das, another VC, weighed in and said it can’t be said whether deeptech is a grift, but explained why it is so hard for investors to back.
The core problem, Das said, is underwriting the return. Early cheques are easy, but deeptech companies rarely show revenue quickly, need heavy capex that must come from equity even after the seed round, and can face uphill regulatory battles.
“The best deep tech investors, consequently either a) have deep deep industry expertise to be able to underwrite technical risk better than an average MBA b) take a lot more ownership to compensate for the risk c) have a deep capital ecosystem with large funds across stages willing to take sizable bets,” he wrote.
Others were quick to slam Maini’s perspective.
“In India it’s always this or that! Why can’t we do both? Sometimes it’s also a wave/trend that boosts a particular kind,” one user wrote.
“You didn’t have to call it grift to make a point about economic contribution,” wrote another.
A day later, Awais Ahmed, founder and CEO of Pixxel, wrote a long post on the topic.
“We celebrate the extraordinary growth of fintech, quick commerce, grocery delivery, and consumer internet businesses (and rightly so!), but occasionally question why anyone would choose to spend ten years building rockets, semiconductors, new materials, or advanced energy systems when far quicker commercial opportunities exist (as has been the case on X recently),” he wrote in a long article on X.
Ahmed argued that the two are not competing visions but “different layers of the same story.” A ten-minute grocery delivery, he noted, rests on the transistor, GPS, lithium-ion batteries, cellular networks and cryptography, built by people who never imagined such a business. “Deeptech expands the frontier of what humanity can do,” he wrote. “Everything built on top of it then expands the frontier of what humanity can use.”
He added at the end that India should keep building great companies in the consumer sector and that their returns will eventually flow back into deep tech.
