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.
As India prepares to operationalise compliance carbon trading in October 2026, global and domestic tailwinds are creating opportunities across carbon management, decarbonisation, removal, circularity and market infrastructure. EcoHQ’s Carbon Industry Map helps distinguish these fundamentally different businesses.
Circularity is much bigger than waste management. This India-first Circularity Industry Map looks at the entire resource lifecycle, from circular design and product life extension to recovery, secondary materials and regeneration, along with the technologies and infrastructure cutting across them. Built for startups and investors, it offers a framework to benchmark solutions, understand adjacent competition, assess market maturity and uncover opportunities that are often missed when circularity is treated as a single sector.
What do uranium stockpiles, critical minerals, battery recycling, low-carbon cement, algae-based materials, data centres, and geopolitical tensions have in common?
More than most people realise.
This article explores why advanced materials may be one of the most overlooked lenses through which to understand climate action, industrial transformation, energy security, circularity, and the industries shaping the next few decades. Through personal observations from eight years in climate and sustainability ecosystems, I unpack how materials sit quietly beneath many of the conversations we treat as separate—and why the future may emerge at the intersections.
Artificial intelligence dominates headlines, investment flows, policy discussions, and boardroom conversations. Yet AI may not be the biggest technology story unfolding today. Beneath the excitement surrounding chatbots, copilots, and foundation models, a far larger infrastructure transition is quietly taking shape. Satellites are observing the planet in real time. Sensors are monitoring everything from power grids to forests. Digital twins are simulating future scenarios before they happen. Robotics are beginning to close the gap between intelligence and action. Cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, cybersecurity systems, digital governance frameworks, and digital public infrastructure are increasingly converging into something much larger than individual industries. Over the past year, while building a sustainability and future technology taxonomy spanning more than 150 domains, I realised I was not looking at separate sectors. I was looking at the emergence of a planetary operating system.
I’ve been watching how the US–Israel–Iran war is playing out across global energy systems, and something doesn’t add up.
Everyone assumed that if fossil fuels became unstable, the world would naturally accelerate its shift to renewables.
But that’s not what’s happening.
What’s actually unfolding is much messier. Governments are scrambling for short-term survival, fossil fuels are becoming profitable again, and the very supply chains needed to build clean energy are under stress.
This is not a transition story.
It’s a systems stress test.
After assessing multiple field-deployed PhD innovations across climate, waste, rural livelihoods and deep tech, one pattern is clear. The science exists. The validation exists. The commercial bridge does not. This is not a talent gap. It is a translational architecture gap.
What two cooperative systems in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu showed me long before I entered the climate space. Early lessons from farmer cooperatives in Bangalore’s outskirts and Dharmapuri—where regeneration wasn’t a concept, but a lived practice. Sharing a few photos from my stay in Dharmapuri at the Tribal Health Initiative, including a partial view of the farms at Tribal Health Initiative.
At The Hindu Sustainability Summit 2025, one message stood out: the future isn’t fossil-free, it’s efficiency-first. From green refineries to tertiary water reuse, Tamil Nadu is quietly building India’s blueprint for circular progress.
India has earned global praise for scaling proven climate-tech models—solar parks, EV fleets, SaaS carbon dashboards. But the frontier isn’t built on speed and scale—it’s about tackling the hardest, high-impact problems.
Globally, startups are pulling CO₂ directly from the sky, insuring farmers with smart contracts, simulating entire climate systems with digital twins, and even betting on fusion to power grids.
India? We’re largely missing in action. India is brilliant at chasing proven models.
But the next trillion-dollar climate startups won’t be EV fleets or SaaS dashboards.
They’ll be parametric insurers, quantum MRV engines, synbio labs, fusion grids, and superconducting VPPs.
If we don’t build them here, we’ll end up importing them—at 10x the cost.