Kiran is the Principal at UTEC (Japan), a $550M deep-tech VC firm affiliated with The University of Tokyo. Since joining UTEC in 2018, Kiran has led investments of close to $25M in frontier science & deep-tech companies incl. Tricog, OPALai (SG/FinTech AI), Bugworks Research, and Agara.


Before joining UTEC, Kiran was the head of India/SEA Operations at Deloitte Tohmatsu Venture Support (DTVS) Japan. He has supported over 50 deep-tech Asian startups by connecting them with Japanese corporations and also worked closely with METI Japan, to lead a project called CEATEC IoT Acceleration for Asian startups. Prior to that, he co-founded a student-led social enterprise named 'Kriya'.

In 2020, Kiran was featured in the prestigious FORBES Asia 30 Under 30 list in the Finance & Venture Capital category.

In this episode we will cover:

1. Kiran’s thoughts on the VC landscape: Second half of 2020 vs Q1 2021

2. Why he chose venture capital as a career path?

3. What is deep-tech?

4. Misconceptions about deep-tech investing

5. What do you look for in a deep-tech founding team?

6. When does a deep-tech startup achieve PMF?

7. Learnings from his own investments and portfolio 

8. The role of the Govt. in growing deep-tech sciences 

9. Mental Models for evaluating and building startups

10. Exits in deep-tech