Ashish Goel was not supposed to be a hardware entrepreneur. He had spent the better part of his career building software — the kind that makes e-commerce platforms run faster, that optimises supply chains, that sits invisibly inside the digital infrastructure of modern India. He was good at it. He was comfortable. And then, in the brutal summer of 2024, his air conditioner broke.
The autumn of 2022 was the year the air in Delhi became a crime scene. For weeks, a thick grey pall of smoke from burning rice stubble in Punjab and Haryana settled over the National Capital Region, pushing the Air Quality Index past 400—"severe," the colour code for a public health emergency. Schools closed. Flights were grounded. The Supreme Court summoned government officials and demanded answers. The chief ministers of the agrarian states pointed at helpless farmers who had no choice but to clear their fields for the next planting season. The farmers pointed at the government, which had promised them affordable alternatives and delivered none. The smoke, season after season, was nobody's fault and everybody's problem.
Dr. Laina Emmanuel was not supposed to be a neurotech entrepreneur. She was a clinical neuropsychologist, the kind who spends her days in hospital wards, assessing patients with brain tumours, traumatic brain injuries, and neurodegenerative diseases. She watched neurosurgeons plan their operations by staring at black-and-white MRI slices, mentally reconstructing the three-dimensional architecture of the brain, and making their best guess about where the tumour ended and the healthy tissue began. She watched them get it wrong—not often, but often enough. A few millimetres in the wrong direction, and a patient who came in for a tumour resection left the operating theatre unable to speak, or walk, or recognise their spouse.
Dr. Asha Krishnan was not supposed to be a startup founder. She was a research scientist at Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, one of India's most respected medical research institutions, working on biomaterials that could one day—perhaps, maybe, eventually—be used to 3D-print human tissue. The work was fascinating, important, and slow. The gap between a published paper and a patient who could see again was measured in decades. She was fine with that. She was a scientist. Patience was the job.
Sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, a 200-kilogram satellite will lift off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. It will ride a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle into low-Earth orbit, separate from its upper stage, and unfurl its solar panels to face the sun. At that moment, it will become something that has never existed before: India's first orbital AI data center. Not a communications relay. Not an Earth-observation platform. A flying computer, carrying data-center-class GPUs into space, capable of running sovereign AI models directly in orbit—processing data at the point of collection, without ever sending a single byte to a terrestrial server.
Sometime in the past week, in a wood-panelled conference room in Oslo, a young engineer from Kochi stood before a gathering of Norwegian maritime executives and Indian government officials and described a machine that most of the people in the room had never seen. The machine was an underwater remotely operated vehicle—a robot designed to descend into the darkness of harbours, dams, and offshore platforms, where human divers cannot go, and inspect the critical infrastructure that the global economy depends on but almost never sees. It could operate at depths that would crush a diver. It could navigate in zero-visibility conditions using sonar and AI-powered computer vision. It could relay high-definition video, sonar imagery, and structural diagnostics to a control station on the surface. And it had been designed, built, and tested not in Norway—the world leader in subsea engineering—but in Kerala, at a startup called EyeROV Technologies, founded by alumni of IIT Madras and backed by the Kerala Startup Mission.
Sometime in the next eighteen months, a machine the size of a small car will lift off from a clearing in the mountains of northern India. It will not need a runway. It will rise vertically, its variable-pitch rotors biting into the thin Himalayan air, a turbocharged internal combustion engine driving an advanced mechanical powertrain that has been designed, tested, and built entirely in India. Slung beneath it will be a payload of 200 kilograms—food, medical supplies, ammunition, construction equipment, whatever the terrain demands. It will fly for two and a half hours, covering 200 kilometres of some of the most unforgiving geography on Earth, and it will land vertically at a forward operating base, a remote village, or a disaster zone that no road has ever reached. Then it will do it again. And again. And again.
The headphones look ordinary. They sit over the ears like any premium audio device, the kind worn by millions of commuters and office workers every day. But inside the ear cups, a system of sensors, electrodes, and adaptive artificial intelligence is doing something no consumer headphone has ever done. It is reading the wearer's brainwaves. It is tracking their heart rate variability in real time. It is detecting the subtle physiological shifts that signal rising stress, fading focus, or the onset of mental fatigue. And then, quietly, without the wearer ever pressing a button, it is responding—adjusting neurostimulation protocols, modulating binaural beats, delivering pre
Ribin Mathew was not supposed to be a roboticist. He was a software engineer, the kind who could have spent a comfortable career building enterprise applications for companies that paid well and asked few questions. But somewhere in the early years of his working life, he stumbled on a statistic that lodged in his brain and refused to leave. Nearly 80 percent of the world's warehouses operate with little or no automation. Not 8 percent. Not 18 percent. Eighty percent. Hundreds of thousands of facilities—the distribution centres that feed the e‑commerce pipelines, the factory floors that build everything from smartphones to car parts, the logistics hubs that move the global economy—are still run largely by humans pushing carts, carrying boxes, and walking miles of concrete every shift. The world had spent a decade building artificial intelligence that could write poetry and generate images. It had spent almost no time building robots that could move a pallet from one end of a warehouse to the other without human supervision.
Ramamurthy Sivakumar has been building chips for longer than most of India's semiconductor startups have existed. He was designing processors when the country's chip ecosystem was still a government monopoly, when the idea of an Indian fabless semiconductor company competing globally was considered a fantasy, and when the phrase "AI-native silicon" had not yet been coined. He spent years inside Intel, where he learned what it takes to architect a processor that ships in the hundreds of millions of units. He watched the mobile revolution transform the semiconductor industry. And then, in 2023, he decided that the next great transformation—the one that would define the rest of his career—was not in data centres or smartphones. It was in the physical world. In the appliances, the electric vehicles, the industrial systems that were about to become intelligent—and that had no chips designed specifically for them.