Hyderabad, May 23, 2024: FTCCI organised a session on Catalyzing Deep-tech Innovations towards Global Presence in the city at its premises on Thursday.
Delivering Key Note address Mr NM Rao, a scientist in protein engineering and CEO of the Atal Incubation Center at CCMB said deep tech refers to cutting-edge technologies that build on advanced science and engineering innovations to bring disruptive new products to the market.
The characteristics of deep-tech startups are strong R &D focused, high entry barrier, intellectual property, complexity, longer time to market, longer gestation, complexity, need for patient capital etc he said.
The key trends shaping deep-tech investment are sustainability taking centre stage, cross-border collaboration, health care, biotech surge, government initiatives, AI and Quantum Computing Boom he said
India is world number 5 in knowledge generation but look at the innovation, we are far behind. Innovation is how you bring knowledge useful to society.
Hyderabad has more central institutions. The entire Habshiguda has many such institutions. So, the locality can even be named Science Corridor.
We must make use of those institutions. Take for instance Veganism. We have the highest vegetarian population in the world with over 30% vegetarians. At the same time, 40% of Indians are protein deficient. Where do get protein if you are a vegetarian? That is a huge opportunity for deep tech research and innovation.
He discussed about cultured meat and what is at stake etc. He added that the main problem with deep tech in India is that it is hard to find investors who are willing to wait for those projects to succeed.
National Deep Tech Start-up policy aims to support and nurture the unique requirements of Deep Tech Startups in India. Now this policy in draft mode and he urged people to contribute to the same to make it a more useful policy.
His talk was followed by a panel discussion on building a global deep-tech ecosystem, which was moderated by Pankaj Dewan, Founder Idea Labs. He observed that Deep-tech has to be driven by youth and startups for a greater future.
The Panelists of the panel were Bala Peddigari, Manish Gupta and Meghna Girish drawn from IT and life science backgrounds.
Meela Jayadev, President of FTCCI said the nation is ready to dominate deep tech research. We have nearly 21000 deep tech startups that emerged in India.
K Mohan Raidu, Chairman of the ICT Committee off FTCCI said deep tech plays a pivotal role in shaping our future.
