India Tech Report

In this episode, I bring you a conversation with Anoop Srikantaswamy, founder and CEO of Moonrider, an electric tractor startup in Bengaluru. Anoop and his fellow founder Ravi Kulkarni bring deep background in the industry, having previously worked at automotive giants such as Toyota and Volvo Group.

Mechanical engineers by training, the two are entrepreneurs at heart, with Anoop having previously attempted a hyper-local medicine delivery venture while Ravi co-founded another electric mobility venture that he exited.

Anoop recalled that the idea for Moonrider was sparked by a conversation with a progressive farmer, who noted that while diesel is expensive, farm electricity is often free. Today, Moonrider is a vertically integrated leader, developing proprietary battery technology and power electronics in-house to achieve price parity with diesel.

In this conversation, we explore their moonshot journey — named in honour of the Chandrayaan launch — and discuss the future of connected and autonomous farming. Join us for an inside look at how Moonrider aims to drive the global shift toward sustainable, electric mechanization.

Chapters

(00:41) Introduction to Moonrider and the vision for a global electric vehicle platform.

(01:45) The Chandrayaan inspiration and the eureka moment for electric tractors.

(07:57) Disrupting India’s million-tractor market and improving energy security.

(09:27) Reimagining ownership through rental models and compressed biogas partnerships.

(15:19) Analyzing the economics of electric versus diesel farming costs.

(17:17) Driving vertical integration and R&D to reach price parity with diesel.

(29:31) Leveraging connected technology and computer vision for higher farm yields.

(36:05) Navigating the global roadmap toward autonomous agricultural pods.

(42:26) Building a high-voltage hardware ecosystem for entrepreneurs in India.

(51:38) Personal reflections on early entrepreneurial side-gigs and founding lessons.

Coming up, a conversation with Anoop Srikantaswamy, founder and CEO of Moonrider, an electric tractor maker in Bengaluru. Catch the full interview on Tuesday, May 19th right here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here’s a short preview, in which Anoop talks about the state of commercialisation of autonomous tractors and what they might be like in the future. He also talks about the bigger picture in agriculture in which autonomous gear will be important, but one of multiple factors.

The first cohort of the India deep tech accelerator at University of Chicago’s Polsky Center. Image courtesy Polsky Center.

(00:00) Just the headlines, if you only have a minute

(01:26) The Polsky Center selects 20 Indian startups for first accelerator

The University of Chicago’s Polsky Center has named 20 startups to the first cohort of its India Deep Tech Accelerator, a global programme for IIT-affiliated ventures. The 10-week accelerator is designed to help founders turn research-heavy ideas into market-ready companies through workshops, coaching, and access to customers, partners and investors in India and the US.

The cohort spans AI, robotics, climate and energy, healthtech, semiconductors, space and industrial software. Selected companies include Adaapt, Augle.AI, BioSky Space Innovations, Curium Life, Folium Sensing, NXPEC Technologies, Timble AI and Zodhya Technologies.

(02:20) C-CAMP opens applications for NBEC 2026

C-CAMP has opened applications for the 9th National Bio Entrepreneurship Competition, a platform for bio-entrepreneurs, startups, student teams, researchers and innovators in the life sciences. The programme will offer mentorship, industry exposure and funding support, with selected startups and individuals eligible for cash prizes and investment opportunities of up to INR 20 crore.

Student teams can win up to INR 10 lakh, and shortlisted applicants will attend a two-day bootcamp led by experts from IIM Ahmedabad. The competition was launched by Karnataka IT/BT Minister Priyank Kharge at C-CAMP.

(03:15) IIT Madras opens California hub for Indian deep-tech startups

IIT Madras Global Research Foundation has launched its first US centre in Menlo Park, California, to help Indian deep-tech startups scale internationally. The hub, established with CA Startups, will focus on research, startup incubation, commercialisation and access to global capital, markets and partnerships.

The project carries a planned investment of $7.5 million, including a $4.5 million greenfield investment from IITM Global. The centre is positioned near Silicon Valley and is intended to strengthen India–US innovation ties, with a second US centre planned for the East Coast.

(04:02) IIT Bombay launches India’s first CCUS field lab

IIT Bombay has inaugurated an integrated pilot facility for carbon capture, utilisation and storage, marking India’s first end-to-end CCUS field laboratory. The project combines an indigenous carbon capture plant with geological CO2 sequestration in Deccan basalt formations, and was launched by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan under the Bharat Innovates 2026 initiative.

The institute said the facility uses a patented aqueous CO2 capture technology and is meant to support India’s long-term net-zero goals through a self-reliant carbon mitigation model.

(04:49) Government maps climate risk in 651 farm districts

The Centre has assessed climate vulnerability across 651 predominantly agricultural districts and found 310 to be at risk, including 109 classified as very highly vulnerable and 201 as highly vulnerable. The assessment, carried out under ICAR’s National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture programme using IPCC protocols, is being used to scale up climate-resilient farming practices, district agriculture contingency plans and farmer support measures across India.

ICAR has also expanded climate-resilient technologies through model villages, KVKs and training programmes, while the government is promoting crop insurance, water-efficient irrigation and resilient seed varieties to help farmers cope with droughts, floods and heat stress.

(05:52) India’s clean energy transition bolsters economic resilience

Clean energy transition is now central to India’s economic resilience and growth strategy, Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy Pralhad Joshi said at the CII Green Business Summit 2026. He highlighted that India has achieved 47 percent of its power capacity from non-fossil sources, ahead of schedule for the 2030 target of 50 percent, with renewables growing at 15.4 percent annually against 4.1 percent for fossil fuels.

Minister Joshi emphasised investments in green hydrogen, battery storage and nuclear energy as key to energy security and net-zero goals by 2070.

(06:41) Flo Mobility raises $2.5 million in pre-Series A

Bengaluru-based construction robotics startup Flo Mobility has raised $2.5 million in a pre-Series A round co-led by Mela Ventures and Arali Ventures. The funding will scale manufacturing, enhance its AI and autonomy stack, expand deployments across India and enter international markets, particularly the Middle East.

The company builds autonomous robots for material movement on construction sites, addressing labour shortages and improving efficiency. Flo Mobility’s robots are already deployed across 10 Indian states with clients including Larsen & Toubro, Godrej Properties and Sobha.

(07:28) HrdWyr raises $13 million Series A to build AI-native chipsRamamurthy Sivakumar and Ganesh Guruswamy, founders of HrdWyr, have just announced a $13 million Series A investment led by Indeaspring Capital. Image courtesy: Sivakumar.

Coming up on Tuesday, 19th May, Anoop Srikantaswamy, founder and CEO of Moonrider, a electric tractor startup on Bengaluru, talks about a range of topics — from product innovation to reducing dependence on China to what tractors will be like in the future as they go autonomous.

Catch the full conversation right here or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a short preview.

Pulkit Agrawal, Co-Founder of Eka Robotics. Image souce: Agrawal’s website.

Eka Robotics has emerged from stealth with a Vision-Force-Action model that it says can push robots beyond the long-standing trade-off between generality and speed in manipulation tasks. The Cambridge, Massachusetts startup was co-founded in 2025 by MIT’s Pulkit Agrawal and former DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. The deep tech entrepreneurs are pitching force sensing and simulation as the route to more capable machines.

In robotics, much of the recent excitement has centred on vision-language-action systems, which treat language as a bridge to physical control. Eka says that is too indirect for the contact-rich realities of the physical world. Its approach instead tries to make robots learn mass, friction and inertia through practice in high-fidelity simulation, then transfer those skills to the messier settings of factories and homes.

Across the robotics industry, the race is on to build foundation models that can scale across tasks, rather than brittle systems tuned for one environment, and the prize is a larger share of warehouse work, light manufacturing and household assistance. The strategic question is whether the winning path is imitation from human data, reinforcement learning in the real world, or simulation-first training that seeks to compress years of trial and error into computational time.

“We’re building intelligence for the physical world in its native language: forces,” Pulkit Agrawal wrote on LinkedIn. In the same post, he added that robotics has long faced a trade-off between “generality” and “speed,” and that “the real world requires both”.

Eka’s presentation suggests confidence that force-aware control can do more than sort objects or pick up toys. The company has highlighted tasks such as screwing in a light bulb and handling slippery items, small feats that still define the frontier of robotic manipulation. For now, the message is as important as the model: the next leap in robotics, Eka is arguing, will come not from making machines more verbal, but from making them more physical.

In this episode, Stuti Kakkar, co-founder of MEINE Electric, a battery energy storage tech startup, unpacks the government’s proposed Approved List of Battery Manufacturers (ALBM) that is reportedly in the works as part of its ambitious $38 billion push to deploy 47 gigawatts of battery storage.

Similar to the solar industry’s ALMM framework, this list aims to mandate localised supply chains for government projects, reducing a heavy reliance on imports, particularly from China, which currently controls over 90 percent of the supply chain. Stuti explains why this move is a game-changer for hardware startups.

While traditional lithium-ion batteries face domestic mineral shortages, alternative chemistries like Iron-Air can be up to 95 percent indigenous from day zero, she says.

Stuti also touches upon how these policy shifts provide the demand visibility for hardware-centric startups, which is needed to scale India’s deep-tech ecosystem.

Stuti Kakkar

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuti-kakkar/

Press release on the government’s plan for BESS development:
https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2246898®=3&lang=2

Founder and CEO Saurabh Chandra with Ati Robotics’ humanoid research prototype Mecha at the company’s products day last year. Image credit: Hari Arakali.

Ati Motors has renamed itself Ati Robotics to better reflect its evolution into a “material orchestration” specialist, the Bengaluru-based provider of autonomous mobile robots said in a recent press release.

The Indian robotics company is moving to win an early lead in this industry-wide shift: the world’s biggest manufacturers, including some of Ati’s customers, are looking at not just deploying robots anymore, but at holistic automation and AI-led solutions that make their overall operations more efficient.

Top manufacturing and factory executives are beginning to understand that in the modern industrial landscape, a machine that moves autonomously isn’t in itself the goal. It’s how one can harness the combination of many such robots, the multiple processes in the factory and the dynamically changing roles of the humans involved to get closer to a “lights out” facility.

“Automation doesn’t stop at the robot,” Founder and CEO Saurabh Chandra, said in the press release, adding the company has built an integrated platform comprising robots, fleet intelligence, AI agents, and the orchestration software that ties them all to the systems running modern factories.

“Ati Robotics is not a new company. It is the honest description of the company we have already become,” Chandra said.

By adopting a name that encompasses its broader ambitions in artificial intelligence and systems orchestration, Ati Robotics is signalling that its own future lies not in the hardware of locomotion, but in the software of intelligence.

Ati was founded in 2017, and has its roots in India’s top scientific research university, the Indian Institute of Science. The company’s Sherpa line of AMRs (tuggers, pallet lifters and so on) have been deployed with more than 70 enterprise customers, and the robots have tracked some 2 million autonomous missions with a success rate of 99 percent, according to the release.

The shift to material orchestration is a necessary one, driven by a chronic shortage of skilled labor and a desperate need for efficiency in the face of fragmented supply chains. Manufacturers want to move away from the “yellow cages” of fixed robotics toward flexible, autonomous systems that can navigate human-centric environments.

For companies such as Ati, this means the competition has shifted from basic hardware reliability to the sophistication of the “digital brains” that can manage fleets — often comprising many different types of robots.

For startups and incumbents alike, the challenge is no longer just making a robot that can carry a pallet, but creating a system that can rethink how that pallet moves in real-time.

One immediate opportunity is the so-called brownfield facility — an existing factory with sunk investments in human-centric infrastructure and equipment. The best solution that can integrate the existing gear effectively at minimal cost will win.

“Customers don’t just buy a robot from us. They buy a material orchestration system – coordination, intelligence, and scalability aligned to how their factory actually works,” says Chris Dolbow, vice president of marketing at Ati. “The shift to Ati Robotics sharpens how we describe what we deliver: the right fit for automation today with intelligent innovation for the future.”

Ati is backed by investors including Walden Catalyst Ventures, NGP Capital and its early-stage investor MFV Partners. The Bengaluru-headquartered company is moving to build on its momentum in the competitive North American and APAC markets. It has also already successfully deployed its orchestration solution at some early customers, CEO Chandra says.

Generated image for illustration: Globe showing interconnected climate data centers and data flow lines across continents

The transition to a low-carbon economy is often framed as a struggle resulting from a combination of engineering challenges and lack of political willpower. A new vision paper argues that the true bottleneck is an information deficit. The Climate and Sustainability Data Exchange (CSDX), a proposed universal digital infrastructure, seeks to move beyond “siloed, project-level fixes” to provide the “shared rails” necessary for a planetary-scale coordination system.

The CSDX vision paper is the result of a collaboration between StepChange and Beckn. StepChange, a climate-tech venture in Bengaluru founded by MIT alumni Ankit Jain and Sidhant Pai, provides a strategic framework for managing ESG, carbon accounting, and climate risk.

Beckn, now called Network for Humanities (NFH, previously the Beckn Foundation), is an international network of labs focused on building open, interoperable digital infrastructure for population-scale systems. It offers the eponymous Beckn protocol, a foundational open protocol that enables interoperable, decentralized digital interactions without reliance on central platforms.

It was co-founded in 2019 by Nandan Nilekani, founding chairman of Aadhaar, India’s Unique ID Authority, Pramod Varma, Aadhaar’s former chief architect, and Sujith Nair, who also serves as its Steward, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The current landscape of sustainability data is a thicket of fragmented portals and manual entries, particularly in the Global South, where information is “limited in quality, expensive to access, and fragile in trust,” the authors of the paper say. Without a common language, capital is frequently mispriced, and the progress of supply chains remains invisible to the regulators and financiers who might otherwise reward decarbonization, they add.

StepChange and Beckn envision a neutral alliance of core members who will act as stewards for the infrastructure, maintaining common schemas and onboarding policies to keep the digital rails accessible and transparent. By combining their technological and environmental expertise, the collaboration seeks to create a federated network where producers, financiers, and regulators can exchange trusted sustainability data at near-zero marginal cost.

The proposal arrives as global climate-driven disaster costs surpass $400 billion annually and energy-related CO₂ emissions have climbed to an all-time high of 37.8 gigatonnes. With atmospheric concentrations now 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, the CSDX initiative aims to standardize the reporting of ESG, carbon accounting, and climate risk to bridge the “data-poor” gap that currently prevents global markets from pricing resilience accurately.

“Like railways, container shipping, or the internet, CSDX provides a minimal, interoperable digital rail that allows any actor to publish and pull records in a common language, at near-zero marginal cost,” StepChange and NFH say.

• ESG Management captures the broad set of non-financial outcomes enterprises create across environment, society, and governance.
• Carbon Accounting provides a rigorous, quantifiable subset of environmental impacts with unique salience for decarbonization.
• Climate Risk ensures that external climate dynamics are translated into financial terms, enabling efficient capital allocation and resilience planning.

Using the Beckn protocol, CSDX envisions a federated architecture where data is “governed at source while becoming globally discoverable.” By aligning with global frameworks like the ISSB and CSRD, the platform ensures that “water-withdrawal intensity,” for example, or “Scope 3” emissions mean the same thing to a textile factory in Nairobi as they do to a bank in Frankfurt.

This is not merely an exercise in corporate disclosure; it is an attempt to create a “functioning control system for the real economy,” where sustainability is embedded into every purchase order and loan decision.

Note:
This copy was updated to include the names of StepChange’s founders, the network NFH, and correct Sujith Nair’s designation.

Inertia Enterprises co-founders (L-R) Prof. Mike Dunne, Jeff Lawson, Dr. Annie Kritcher. The company has struck a strategic partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to commercialise nuclear fusion science. Image courtesy Inertia

(00:22) Microsoft clarifies stance on carbon credits purchases

Microsoft issued a clarification after reports earlier this month that it had informed carbon credit developers of a temporary halt in new purchases. That news, reported first by Heatmap News, had caused immediate ripples in the carbon removal sector, as Microsoft has been the market’s dominant force, representing roughly 90 percent of global durable carbon removal purchases in 2025.

Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa clarified that the “carbon removal program has not ended,” according to reports including those from ESG Dive and ESG Today. The company remains committed to its goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030.

(01:20) Fission startup X-energy files for $800 million IPO

Nuclear energy startup X-energy has officially launched its investor roadshow, filing for an initial public offering to raise up to $800 million, TechCrunch reports. The Maryland-based company is targeting a valuation of approximately $7.5 billion, with shares priced between $16 and $19.

(02:13) Inertia partners US national lab to commercialise fusion science

Inertia Enterprises has signed a landmark strategic partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to transition experimental fusion science into a commercial energy source. The collaboration includes a licensing agreement for nearly 200 patents and joint research focused on scaling the laser-driven technology used to achieve “ignition” at the National Ignition Facility.

(03:30) Battery recycler Ascend Elements files for bankruptcy

Ascend Elements, a leading U.S. battery recycling startup, has officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to address a critical liquidity crisis, MLQ.ai reports. Despite raising over $500 million from high-profile investors like Honda and SK On, the company faced insurmountable financial pressure from plummeting lithium-ion material prices and significant construction delays at its primary facilities.

(04:47) US Department of Energy restores $1.2 billion for carbon removal

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has reversed its decision to cancel funding for major climate initiatives, restoring support for carbon direct air capture (DAC) projects previously awarded under the Biden administration, World Energy News reports. The move, confirmed in a report to Congress, ensures that nearly 2,000 projects will retain their funding after a period of intense review by the current administration.

(05:37) India officially withdraws bid to host UN climate summit in 2028

The Indian government has formally rescinded its offer to host the 33rd United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP33) in 2028, Reuters reports. Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal confirmed the withdrawal after a press briefing on Friday last, stating that “several issues” were considered following a review of the country’s commitments for that year.

(06:26) Steel emissions reduction target

India’s own efforts continue, towards meeting its target of hitting net zero by 2070. The Indian government has drafted a comprehensive National Steel Policy roadmap aiming to double the nation’s crude steel capacity to 400 million tonnes by 2035-36. According to internal documents and recent ministry briefings at the Bharat Steel 2026 summit, this expansion will be paired with a mandatory 25% reduction in carbon emissions intensity, Reuters reported earlier this month.

(07:37) World Bank shareholders seek solution to preserve climate strategy

International shareholders of the World Bank, led by France, are urgently seeking ways to maintain the lender’s climate change financing strategy after its official expiration in June, Reuters reports. French development minister Éléonore Caroit stated during the IMF-World Bank spring meetings in Washington that letting the current action plan lapse is “unacceptable.”

Far from the romance and glamour of humanoids, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) such as tuggers and pallet lifters that don’t evoke any excitement — unless you’re an engineer, perhaps — are quietly trundling around factory floors, changing how things are made.
But the transformation is nascent and factory executives still scratch their heads about what the real RoI (return on investment) might be from robots.

Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO at Ati Motors, a Bengaluru robotics venture that makes AMRs for material movement in factories, explains his perspective on this here.
He also offers a couple of micro case studies of implementations that Ati has executed for its customers and the encouraging results they’ve seen.