June 07, 2022

Shailesh Vickram Singh at Climate Angels on the need for ‘SIDBI-like’ LPs in climate tech in India

31 minutes

Our guest today is Shailesh Vickram Singh, founder of Massive Mobility, an EV charging infrastructure company, and founder of Climate Angles, a syndicated climate tech investment platform, backed by other entrepreneur-investors including Phanindra Sama and Vijay Shekhar Sharma. In this episode, Shailesh talks about the need for large institutional investors to enter India’s climate tech funding scene, similar to what SIDBI did for the earlier generations of startups in this country.

(00:39) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:50) Our guest today — Shailesh Vickram Singh, founder of Massive Mobility and Climate Angels

(02:07) A snapshot of Shailesh’s career as an entrepreneur and then VC and PE investor

(03:26) A brief background on Massive Fund that Shailesh set up with Vijay Shekhar Sharma, and how that led to the founding of Climate Angels

(08:04) Some of the established entrepreneur-investors who are part of Climate Angels

(09:15) What the Climate Angels network has already done so far and near-term plans ahead

(10:23) Being ‘sector-focused and stage agnostic’ — most deals are early-stage, but a few are also at series A; And typically in startups with products in the market

(11:21) Some examples of startups that Climate Angels have backed so far

(13:24) Sectors of interest for future investments in addition to the current ones

(13:39) A bit more on how the EV ecosystem will connect with future ‘smart grids’

(15:37) More thoughts on investment potential in the Agri sector — for example, precision agriculture

(16:47) How the access to better data today has enabled more climate tech startups

(17:57) An example from Israel — a startup that’s developed an IoT sensor-based solution to determine the water stress a plant is under

(19:32) What are the biggest go-to-market challenges faced by climate tech startups in India

(21:36) What might be the economic opportunity in climate tech in India — ‘billions of dollars’

(22:17) The challenge ahead is to not repeat the same patterns of the Western markets of the past — ‘everything will be new’

(23:52) More specifically, what’s the state of funding in India today for climate tech

(26:25) Challenges ahead — selling to large corporate buyers, and finding the talent, which isn’t like training a fresher on coding; this work is happening in bits and pieces, in multiple schools, with people who love science and math, but we need many many more

(28:51) On the need for the world’s largest financial institutions to get into climate tech funding in India, like how Sidbi acted as an LP for several VCs for earlier startups