The product doesn't exist and the projections are mostly hope. What investors are underwriting is the founder's ability to build the numbers, especially in climate-tech, where that road runs ten years long.
What investors are really watching when they look past the pitch deck
India has raised $12.8 billion for climate startups since 2008. Most of it never reaches the founders who need it most.
Climate-tech founders need more than a promising prototype: they need deep industry knowledge, customer traction, financial discipline, and the grit to build for the long term.
At SRM’s TerraNext panel, I argued that universities and corporates must do more to turn student innovations into real pilots and first customers.
Here’s what I shared about investment readiness, the funding gap, and why students should start experimenting now.
At CLiMAFiX 2026, founders, investors and industry leaders kept returning to the same challenge: how does a climate tech startup survive long enough for its solution to be adopted at scale? From the first paid customer to long sales cycles, corporate trust and patient capital, the discussions showed how much work lies between proving a technology and building a business.
Why startup outcomes depend on the founder, the market, and the systems surrounding both.
A strong founder can improve a product, recruit a team and manage capital with discipline. But no founder can single handedly create customer readiness, infrastructure, supply chains, regulation and patient capital at the same speed.
The energy transition alone spans critical minerals, AI data centres, nuclear energy, storage, grids, carbon management, energy security, industrial competitiveness, cooling infrastructure, and about a hundred other rabbit holes. This is no longer a conversation happening inside environmental circles. It is becoming a conversation about how economies, industries, and societies function.
After months of evaluating startups, speaking with founders and investors, and reviewing research-led innovations, I keep encountering the same underlying challenge. The problem is rarely a lack of ideas, talent, or ambition. More often, it is a failure of translation—between capital and growth, expertise and credibility, research and market adoption. Here are a few patterns I have been noticing across startup rooms lately.
What does it really take to build a venture-scale company in a world that refuses to stay predictable?
In a three-hour fireside chat with Karthik B. Reddy, the discussion moved beyond frameworks and into the lived realities of founders and investors, covering everything from market sizing and team dynamics to climate tech, capital flows, and the long game of building.
A personal observation on how climate action still ends up tied to Big Oil because of where the capital sits Last year, I was at a sustainability conference where the event was powered by the Indian Petroleum Corporation. During one…