Start-ups take the boardroom at The Hindu Deep Tech Summit

At The Hindu Deep Tech Summit 2026 on Monday (April 6, 2026), innovation stepped out of presentation decks and into a high-stakes boardroom. In a session styled like a live funding round, entrepreneurs pitched not just ideas, but conviction– laying bare their origin stories, market potential and the capital they needed to grow. The narrative for these founders move beyond ideas to ask the hardest question: who will back them to scale?

Organised in collaboration with SRM Institute of Science and Technology (SRMIST), the boardroom pitches brought together a diverse cohort of founders, from deep tech and mobility to health and AI, each attempting to bridge the gap between invention and investment.

There was no shortage of ambition. Start-ups like Chittam, Edio Innovations and Pulse Lavage showcased solutions rooted in real-world inefficiencies, while ventures such as Torus Motion and Reflow Technologies leaned into engineering and sustainability. Others, including OrzuLife, Mikaela.ai and Tamirobot, reflected a growing shift toward AI-led and automation-driven ecosystems. Even student-led teams and early-stage innovators stepped forward, signalling how deeply entrepreneurship has permeated academic spaces.

But what set the session apart was its tone. This was not a showcase but, it was scrutiny. Founders were expected to articulate not just what they were building, but why it mattered, who would pay for it, and how fast it could scale. Numbers– valuation, revenue, runway– sat alongside narratives of persistence and problem-solving.

Across the table sat an equally formidable panel of investors, operators and ecosystem leaders, including Kalpana Sastry, Balakumar Thangavelu, Satish Ganeshan, Chandrasekhar Kupperi, Anil Kumar, Aravind Suresh, Vaishali James, Gowtham Suresh, Senthil Kumar Rajendran, Krithik Abiram Govindan, Sridhar Bharathway, Gaurav Nirwan, Ananth Kumar, M.V. Subramanian, Kalairsi Periyasamy and Venugopal Chindata. Their role was not just to evaluate, but to challenge—probing assumptions, stress-testing business models and pushing founders to think beyond prototypes.

Clear pattern

What emerged was a clear pattern: The strongest pitches were not necessarily the most complex; they were the most grounded. Founders who demonstrated clarity of market need, a viable path to revenue and an understanding of scale stood out. The questions, often sharp, circled back to fundamentals: Is this solving a real problem? Can it survive competition? And most importantly, can it grow?

Yet, beneath the pressure, there was also possibility. For many founders, especially those emerging from ecosystems foreign from what they were scaling into, this was a first encounter with the language of capital, where innovation must translate into impact, and impact into returns.

In that room, the distance between lab and market felt both stark and surmountable.

In the auditorium, if the earlier panels spoke about convergence and collaboration and industry, the boardroom made one thing clear: the future of deep tech will ultimately be decided not just by ideas, but by who is willing to invest in them.