Looking back at the Deep Science Forum 2026

The third Deep Science Forum brought founders, researchers, investors, industry leaders and policymakers together in Bengaluru on 13 January 2026 for a full day on the question that decides whether deep science ventures make it: commercialization and scale-up.

The day opened with a keynote from Group Captain Prasanth Balkrishna Nair, followed by a fireside chat on scaling deep science ventures with Deepak Shapeti of Morphing Machines and Renuka Diwan of BioPrime, moderated by Vishal Krishna of UpStream Life Media.

Manufacturing and scale-up took the late morning, with Avishek Kumar of VFlowTech, Sri Sailaja Nori of Sea6 Energy and Kedar Medhi, innovation advisor and former director at Philips Ventures, on what it takes to move from a working prototype to a plant. Dr. Vikram Rao, former CTO of Halliburton, followed with a session on IP protection and strategy, the part of the journey deep science founders most often underestimate.

The afternoon split into industry-specific rooms: Bioindustrials with Vinod Kumar of String Bio, Energy with Tejas Kusurkar and Rishi Srivastava of OffGrid Energy Labs, AI and Compute with Sanchayan Sinha of Turiyam AI, and Spacetech with AVM Dhananjay Khot, Director of Strategy and Planning at IN-SPACe.

Capital ran through the closing sessions. Dilip Gopinath of HSBC Bank covered debt financing for deep science startups, and a closing panel on the capital stack brought together Ashish Ranjan of Kotak Alternate Asset Managers and Manish Singhal of pi Ventures. Suraj Nair and Vishal Katariya presented findings from Ankur Capital's India Deep Science Tech Report, moderated by Alysha Maria Lobo. The day closed with a networking mixer hosted by AWS.

Across the four technology areas on the agenda, AI, biotechnology, advanced materials and semiconductors, the through-line was the one the Forum was built around: Indian deep science ventures rarely fail on the science. They struggle where the science has to become a product, a plant and a business.