‘Patient’ capital needed for India to stay in the battle for AI

What’s rising quietly is a form of patient capital— investors who aren’t chasing exits but seeking purpose

The Indian start-up story runs on a timer. It has seven years to grow, cash out, and move on. That’s long enough to build an app and not something like the semiconductor industry. This seven-year cycle rewards speed, not substance. The clock runs out long before real innovation starts.

To build technologies that endure, the country must learn to build investors who can wait. Because what’s at stake is not just sovereignty over data but sovereignty over imagination. (Representative photo)

In the world of deep tech what it means is that a company at work to build high tech products such as semiconductor chips for instance does not need seed money; it needs faith money — capital that can wait a decade for results. But India’s venture ecosystem isn’t built for patience. This came up during a conversation with Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Neysa AI Sujith Janardanan.

This has to do with the fact that most Indian funds are tied to foreign limited partners who expect profits and exit within seven or eight years on the outside. This works in consumer internet businesses where valuations balloon on promise but not in businesses where returns take time to come.

There’s a nuance Janardanan adds: “The markets will force the change.” But what about the capital that can help? It will come from a different species altogether. “More strategic investors will play a big role. A lot of the family home offices will play a more active role in enabling this ecosystem than traditional VCs who get funding from foreign LPs. That’s not going to help us.”

What’s rising quietly is a form of patient capital— investors who aren’t chasing exits but seeking purpose. Money that behaves less like a trader and more like a builder: steady, layered, compounding quietly over years.

Some of this patience is emerging from corporate groups with stakes in energy, mobility, and materials. Some of it from limited partners tired of the VC treadmill. And, unexpectedly, a new player has entered the arena. Janardanan points out that this investor is not one that was expected to play a role: the government.

For decades, the Indian state confined itself to regulating technology, not investing in it. When data centres rose, it arrived late with policy. When cloud computing boomed, it merely observed. AI has changed that. Control over computing power and data has become synonymous with national destiny. Having missed the semiconductor wave in the 1980s, India cannot afford to miss the AI train now. The government’s entry into deep-tech investment may unsettle free-market purists, but it signals an overdue recognition that technological autonomy cannot depend on venture capital’s short fuse. Money alone will not bridge the gap. The deeper fracture lies between academia, industry, and investors. “Our collaboration between academy and industry is weak,” said Janardanan. “And the investment ecosystem that supports innovation in India, especially deep tech, is weak.”

In Israel, a country a fraction of India’s size, university labs routinely spin out start-ups that defence firms and venture funds co-develop. In India, research still dies in conference papers. The irony, Janardanan noted, is that demand here is far greater: “People say India doesn’t have a large enough market to solve for deep tech. I don’t understand this. We’re the country that requires it most because of the scale of problems we have to solve for the scale of our population.”

The arguments on entities such as family offices staying invested in the game stands to scrutiny with Rishabh Mariwala. He is founder and managing partner at Sharrp Ventures, the Mariwala Family Office who calls it “spot on.” His own investment interests lie largely outside deep-tech ventures. But the reasoning, he says, captures the shift underway — from impatient capital to money that can wait.

This, at its core, is not a story about money. It is a story about time. Indian capital still fears it. It confuses patience with passivity and urgency with speed. Innovation, especially deep innovation, thrives in the middle ground — urgent patience.

To build technologies that endure, the country must learn to build investors who can wait. Because what’s at stake is not just sovereignty over data but sovereignty over imagination.

When that patience finally arrives, it will not announce itself through valuations. It will surface quietly — in new labs, new materials, and new ideas built on Indian soil. And years later, the world may look back and recognise it for what it always was: capital with a conscience.

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com)