In Bengaluru’s Jakkur neighbourhood, where heat can be prickly, 23-year-old Shreepoorna S Rao works out of a 2,000-square-foot workspace that will soon be dwarfed by what’s coming.
His company, Arctus Aerospace, is preparing to move into a facility five times larger, where they’ll build unmanned aerial vehicles with 15-metre wingspans — what Rao calls “unmanned fighter jets,” not mere drones.
“We are not a drone company,” he insists with the kind of certainty that seems to be the exclusive province of the very young or the very accomplished. In Rao’s case, remarkably, it’s both.
“We are building drones that fly at 40-45,000 feet. That is pure aerospace. We are building fixed-wing UAVs. That distinction is very clear, and that makes us completely different from what others do,” he states.
Fifteen kilometres away, in Malleswaram, and within walking distance of the hot favourite Rameshwaram Cafe, Akash Kulgod leads an effort to train dogs to detect cancer from human breath samples. At 24, Kulgod, a University of California (UC) Berkeley graduate, has already established partnerships with six hospitals across Karnataka for his startup, Dognosis.
The company’s most recent study achieved 96 per cent sensitivity and 99 per cent specificity in cancer detection — numbers that would make veteran medical researchers envious. “We had 25 cancer samples and 175 controls,” Kulgod explains, “and the dogs just got one wrong in each of those categories. They identified 24 of the 25 masks that had cancer, and out of the 175 who didn’t have cancer, they got only one wrong.”
Meanwhile, in Chennai, Shaivee Malik’s company, Yotuh Energy, is manufacturing its new batch of 16 refrigeration units for small-sized trucks. At 25, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi graduate has already moved past the pilot stage, with paying customers that include distributors for Amul ice cream and McCain frozen foods.
Her cooling solutions reduce refrigeration-running costs by 75 per cent, with each unit saving between 3 and 36 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. “We are actually a cooling solutions company,” Malik says, clarifying her long-term vision. “We are starting with truck-based ACs because they are the ones that are very unsustainable the way they are powered by the diesel engine.”
And at IIT Madras, Harish Rajesh, 22, is preparing to test a 100-kg-payload “ground effect vehicle” — an aircraft that flies mere metres above water surfaces, promising intercontinental travel at one-tenth the cost of current options. His plans for his venture, Waterfly Technologies, are audacious: 3,000-tonne ground effect vehicles that can ferry passengers anywhere across the world for under a hundred dollars, or roughly Rs 8,500.
“In its biggest form,” Rajesh says, his eyes bright with possibility, “I intend my vehicle to be the size of a football field. So if we manage to build this, this will be the biggest flying object ever built.”
Elsewhere, 23-year-old Anagha Rajesh works out of both the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (CCAMP) and, quite often, her living room. The Birla Institute of Technology And Science (BITS) Goa chemistry graduate is developing something out of science fiction: data storage using DNA molecules.
Her startup, BioCompute, aims to revolutionise how we preserve digital information. “The kind of data that you are storing in data centres worth like a few hundred acres of land,” she explains, “you could now store in a small tube.”
These five entrepreneurs represent a striking phenomenon in India’s startup ecosystem: audaciously young founders tackling dauntingly complex technological challenges without the safety net of extensive work experience.
While the average age of high-tech founders in the United States (US) hovers in the early forties, according to Harvard Business Review , India’s median entrepreneurial age is just 27. But even this age figure seems to be lowering of late. More remarkable still is the increasing number of graduates plunging directly into deep technology (deep tech) ventures — fields that traditionally demand years of specialised expertise.
The Campus Pipeline
What explains this surge of twenty-something deep tech founders in India? The answer begins on college campuses, where extracurricular technical programmes have become powerful incubators for entrepreneurial ambition.
For Malik and Harish Rajesh, Formula Student — engineering design competitions challenging undergraduates to build single-seat racing cars — provided both technical foundation and entrepreneurial mindset. “That experience is really powerful,” Harish Rajesh reflects, “because, more than anything else, it gives you the confidence that you can actually build something out of nothing.”
These campus activities offer more than technical training; they create immersive environments where students develop interdisciplinary collaboration skills in addition to technical skills. During the pandemic’s second wave, for instance, Malik’s team adapted by converting her grandmother’s 3BHK home in Gurugram into an impromptu workshop. “The kitchen slabs were used to do electronics things,” she recalls with characteristic matter-of-factness, “and the outside porch area was where the car was being assembled.”
Such experiences cultivate a form of resourcefulness that traditional industry training rarely demands. When pandemic restrictions forced Harish Rajesh’s team to “start from scratch” while simultaneously transitioning from combustion engines to electric ones in Formula Student competitions, the constraints became catalysts for innovation. “You have zero baggage and zero context,” he explains, “and you just have to build something from zero to one.”
For Anagha Rajesh, the path to entrepreneurship wound through a series of formative experiences that began in high school. At 16, she participated in a hackathon organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency where her team designed a device to detect Alzheimer’s disease using nuclear technology. “I think it was like a life-changing project,” she recalls. “It gave me the opportunity to go and visit the UAE’s (United Arab Emirates’) first nuclear power plant.”
Later, while at BITS Goa, she co-founded a project called Accessible Labs, developing prototypes to make science experiments accessible to visually impaired students. “A very basic thing is like how do you do a litmus paper test, right?” she asks rhetorically. “For us, you dip the paper and you see the colour change and you move on. But how does that work if visually impaired students have to do it?” The project secured grant funding and was eventually adopted by the computer science department, with a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) student now working on it full-time.
This pattern of identifying problems and developing tangible solutions runs through all five founders’ stories.
Rao participated in technical competitions from an early age, making flying objects since he was 12. At IIT Madras, which boasts of an excellent ecosystem for nurturing new ventures, he was the head of the aero club, and even got a couple of patents in his name, not to mention a whole other startup in the crypto space.
Kulgod’s undergraduate thesis — a cognitive model of canine olfaction — laid the groundwork for Dognosis. “Before I started my last year at Berkeley,” he notes, “the idea that then became Dognosis was seeded. And I intentionally decided to focus my thesis on what I felt would be the foundation for that pursuit.”
The Experience Question
The conventional wisdom suggests that technological innovation, particularly in fields like aerospace, medical diagnostics, and energy systems, requires extensive industry experience. Yet these young founders are challenging that assumption, raising questions about whether industry experience is always an asset in deep tech innovation.
None of these entrepreneurs spent more than a year in traditional employment before launching their ventures. Kulgod returned from Berkeley and immediately began exploring canine research labs globally. Rao designed his first drone while still completing his civil engineering degree at IIT Madras. Malik and her co-founder spent nearly a year researching sustainability challenges before founding Yotuh, but never entered corporate employment.
This absence of corporate experience may actually be advantageous in certain contexts. Untethered to industry conventions and unburdened by institutional thinking, these entrepreneurs approach problems with fresh perspectives. Rao, for example, is taking a totally different route with making drones or UAVs in India. “What is happening is, some dude is working on a motor, some dude is working on a propeller, some dude is working on a chassis,” Rao observes about India’s fragmented drone ecosystem. “We are building the entire UAV in-house,” he states, confident that this approach stands to serve Indian industry better.
Such holistic approaches might be discouraged in established industry environments, where specialisation is prized and challenging systemic frameworks can be career-limiting. These young founders, by contrast, seem allergic to incremental thinking.
“Since the airplane and the container ship, there has been literally no innovation in transportation,” Harish Rajesh declares with a sweeping assertion that makes you think twice. Yet this willingness to question fundamental assumptions drives his vision for “the railways moment for the 21st century.”
His technology leverages the “ground effect” phenomenon: “Why do airplanes fly? They fly because you push the air down, and then the plane goes up. Now when you fly close to the ground and when you push the air down, the air gets pushed in two ways — you push the air down, and the air gets pushed back from the ground. You stay afloat because there’s some sort of a cushion that gets generated.”
The absence of industry experience also appears to foster greater comfort with interdisciplinary collaboration. Kulgod’s venture bridges cognitive science, canine behaviour, machine learning, and oncology — a convergence unlikely to emerge within traditional career pathways.
“I mentioned that in the Kulgod family there are 11 doctors, but there are also 11 dogs,” he says with a laugh. He didn’t want to be the twelfth doctor in his family, and his love for dogs stayed intact through the transition into adulthood. And now, he has managed to forge an interesting career progression, combining various aspects and lines of thought that stretch back to his childhood.
Anagha Rajesh’s work similarly crosses traditional boundaries, combining chemistry, molecular biology, computer science, and data engineering. The four-part challenge she’s tackling — encoding data into DNA, reading it out, storage, and retrieval — requires expertise across multiple scientific domains. “We are making modifications to DNA outside cells using enzymes to encode data into it,” she explains, describing a process that sounds deceptively straightforward in her telling but represents a frontier of biotechnology.
From Personal to Planetary
What distinguishes these ventures from typical startup pursuits is the founders’ orientation towards large-scale impact rather than quick returns. Each entrepreneur articulates a vision that transcends immediate market opportunities.
For Rao, the catalyst was personal tragedy — the death of a friend in military service — but his eventual response was to question, as well as solve for, Indian industry’s dominant approach to aerospace. “If we want to become an aerospace power,” he asserts, “we have to fundamentally build the entire stack in order for the country to move forward.” Arctus Aerospace is building the entire UAV stack in-house, with three prototypes already flight-tested at the DRDO’s Aeronautical Test Range facility near Chitradurga, Karnataka. The company is working to raise its UAVs’ endurance from 18 to 36 hours and increase payload capacity from 100 to 250 kg.
Kulgod’s focus on cancer detection addresses a particularly urgent challenge in India, where late diagnosis dramatically reduces survival rates. “The ultimate problem, which is especially stark in India, is that until someone has symptoms, no one is in the hospital getting tested for cancer,” he explains. “By the time you have symptoms, you’re already in stage 3 or 4 where your treatment success odds plummet from what could have been a 90 per cent chance of full recovery to something as low as a 10 per cent chance in the case of oral cancer.”
At their kennel and lab facility in Nelamangala, Dognosis has 10 dogs being trained to detect cancer from breath samples — face masks worn by individuals for 10 minutes and then sealed in bags. The dogs sniff these samples while sensors and machine learning models record their cognitive processes, creating a scalable, cost-effective screening tool that could revolutionise early cancer detection.
Malik’s Yotuh Energy addresses inefficiencies in India’s cold chain logistics, targeting a critical gap in the market. “Tata Ace is one of the most common vehicles used for small deliveries. Generally small business owners have these vehicles. But right now, if somebody wants to use Tata Ace for cold chain deliveries for, say, ice creams, you can’t do it,” she explains. “The AC units currently available in the market run with the vehicle engine only. If you add an extra load of AC on the engine, it takes extra fuel to run the AC and the vehicle. The Tata Ace engine is not that powerful to run the AC and the vehicle both.”
This insight led Yotuh to develop independent refrigeration units powered by lithium-ion batteries, making it possible for small trucks to handle refrigerated deliveries without excessive fuel consumption. The company now operates four of its own vehicles in Chennai and has sold eight units to customers like bakeries, dairy companies, and distributors of Amul ice cream and McCain frozen foods.
Harish Rajesh envisions a future where his ground-effect vehicles could make intercontinental travel dramatically more affordable. “A trip from Chennai to Kolkata would cost just about Rs 600,” he projects, a fraction of current airfare. After testing a prototype at IIT Madras, he plans to fly a 100-kg-payload craft over a lake this summer, a crucial step towards his long-term vision of 3,000-tonne vehicles the size of football fields.
Anagha Rajesh is tackling the rapidly accelerating challenge of data storage. The DNA storage technology she’s developing could transform how information is preserved for generations. While DNA data storage has been theoretically explored since the 1980s, BioCompute aims to convert scientific concepts into commercially viable products.
Supported by grants from programmes like the Atomic Fellowship and investments from gradCapital, Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath’s WTF fund, and government initiatives like Nidhi Prayas and Tide, her four-person team is working to overcome the technical challenges of encoding, reading, storing, and retrieving data in molecular form.
This pattern suggests another characteristic of these young deep tech founders: they’re drawn to problems that combine technical complexity with clear social impact. Rather than optimising existing systems or creating incremental improvements, they gravitate towards transformative potential.
“After graduating in 2021, we started thinking, ‘This is going to be a new decade. What will really matter this decade?’” Malik recalls. This orientation towards generational challenges rather than quarterly objectives may be another hallmark of youth — the willingness to commit formative years to ventures with uncertain but potentially extraordinary outcomes.
The Pragmatic Dreamers
Despite their ambitious visions, these founders display striking pragmatism in execution. Each has developed strategies to navigate the particular challenges of building deep tech ventures in India.
Recognising the difficulties of selling indigenous drones to government agencies, Rao pivoted to a data-as-service model.
“For the next five years, for our customers, we are a data company,” he explains. “You come to us, you come on to our website, choose the area you want to map, tell us what’s the frequency, pay the subscription fee, that’s it.” Arctus will be able to capture data for private customers at “1/100th of the price of the service delivered by satellite providers,” according to Rao, while maintaining profit margins that make the business sustainable without government contracts.
Malik began with small-scale pilots, gradually expanding as technology improved and market validation strengthened. “We took 3-4 of our vehicles on loan and installed our ACs on them,” she notes. “This was when we were still doing our improvements, but we did not want to keep the customer aspect waiting.” From just one vehicle in November 2023, Yotuh now has four vehicles and its own factory in Chennai, where they manufacture refrigeration units and assemble them onto trucks with container bodies.
Kulgod’s approach involves careful scientific validation through partnerships with six hospitals across Karnataka — three in Hubballi and three in Bengaluru — representing a mix of private, non-profit, and government institutions. “We have clinicians at each of these hospitals who are co-investigators in the study,” he explains. “The hospitals provide us access to the patients.” By focusing on multiple types of cancer, Dognosis is developing what’s called a “multi-cancer early detection test,” designed to raise red flags for any type of cancer, maximising potential public health impact.
Anagha Rajesh began with a grant-funded exploratory phase rather than immediately establishing a company. “When I started it, I was not convinced that this should become a company,” she explains. The Atomic Fellowship allowed her to test her concept before seeking additional funding. Now BioCompute operates between institutional laboratory facilities at CCAMP and impromptu workspace in Rajesh’s living room — a pragmatic approach to resource constraints that characterises many early-stage deep tech ventures in India.
Even Harish Rajesh, whose vision for intercontinental transport sounds, in plain words, crazy, has established methodical testing protocols, beginning with scaled prototypes in controlled environments before advancing to larger implementations. He acknowledges the long odds of success but says that’s precisely what drives him.
This blend of ambition and pragmatism distinguishes India’s emerging cohort of young deep tech founders from both traditional industry innovators and typical software startup entrepreneurs. They are neither constrained by institutional boundaries nor untethered from technical realities.
A New Generation of Innovation
The phenomenon highlights the evolving landscape of Indian entrepreneurship. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs may have been anomalously young when they founded Microsoft and Apple, but in contemporary India, youth is increasingly the norm for founders. According to an published on Startup Grind, 80 per cent of Indian founders launch their startups before age 30, and virtually all Indian unicorns were established by entrepreneurs under 35. It appears that this age slider may be getting pulled back further.
For this new generation of twenty-something deep tech founders, technical complexity isn’t a barrier to entry but a compelling attraction. “We could have chosen to work on something that has a relatively high probability of success and is easy to do, like software,” Harish Rajesh observes, “but we chose to work on something that’s really deep tech, with a very low probability of success.”
In a global innovation landscape often criticised for producing incremental advances rather than fundamental breakthroughs, these young Indian founders stand out for their willingness to pursue high-risk, high-impact ventures. Whether they succeed in building unmanned fighter jets, cancer-detecting dogs, sustainable cooling systems, revolutionary transport networks, or molecular data storage, what matters is that they are giving deep tech innovation a shot, and doing it early, perhaps before the dreaded fear of failure can set in.
As Harish Rajesh puts it with characteristic understatement, “There are a lot of ways in which we can fail. But the reason why we show up every day and do this is, if at all in the crazy event that it succeeds, it’s really going to change the world.”
