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Indian Deeptech Reaches Series B at 7%. Its Space Companies Do It at 19%.

A reader asked whether our Series B figure was a real graduation rate. It was not, so we recomputed it. The deeptech-versus-everything-else gap did not survive the recount. The gap inside deeptech did, and it runs from zero to nineteen percent.

Published 12 Sept 2026

India deeptech, seed to Series B: 7.2%
Best sector (space): 19.0%
Worst sector (agri-food): 0 of 32
US deeptech, same cascade: 18.7%

Two weeks ago we published a figure: 97 of India''s 3,344 funded deeptech companies have reached Series B. A reader asked the obvious follow-up. Is that 2.9% wildly different from non-deeptech Indian startups, and what does the equivalent number look like in the US?

Both good questions, and answering the first one properly required admitting that 2.9% was the wrong number.

It was a stock ratio: everything currently at Series B or later, divided by everything in the database with any funding recorded. That denominator contains companies funded last year that could not possibly have graduated, companies whose only money was a grant or an angel cheque, and companies that died in 2019 and will sit in the data at their terminal stage forever. Divide by it and you learn about the shape of a database, not about Indian deeptech. We have corrected the original piece.

The right construction is a cohort. Take companies incorporated between 2014 and 2020, so everyone has had at least five years. Count only those that reached a recorded seed round or later, so the denominator is companies that actually entered the funnel. On that basis Indian deeptech converts at 23.4% from seed to Series A and 7.2% from seed to Series B, across 525 companies.

So the honest headline is 7.2%, not 2.9%. It is still the lowest number in this article.

The comparison that did not survive

The reader''s first question deserves a straight answer, and the straight answer is that we cannot show a reliable difference.

Our enrichment pipeline classifies companies as deep tech or not using the same method and the same sources, which gives us 9,446 non-deeptech companies as a control measured with an identical instrument. We ran the comparison two ways and the two ways disagree. Anchored on self-reported founding year, deeptech converts seed to Series B at 7.3% against 14.3% for the control, a large penalty. Anchored on MCA incorporation date, which is a registry fact rather than something read off a website, deeptech converts at 7.2% and the control at 6.5%. No penalty at all.

The control groups are 63 and 46 companies, with nine and three reaching Series B. At those sizes the two results are not distinguishable from each other or from no difference.

There is also a selection problem. Our non-deeptech group is not a random sample of Indian startups; it is companies that entered a deep tech candidate pool and were rejected on inspection, so they skew adjacent and technical.

So: no finding. Settling it properly means enriching a matched random sample of several thousand non-deeptech Indian startups, which we have queued. What we will not do is publish the specification that gave the more interesting answer and quietly drop the one that did not.

The comparison that did

The variation inside deeptech is far larger than any gap between deeptech and everything else, and the samples are big enough to mean something.

Share of seed-or-later companies reaching Series A and Series B, by sector:

Space: 42 companies, 40.5% to Series A, 19.0% to Series B. Computing and AI: 101, 24.8%, 12.9%. Mobility and transport: 165, 30.9%, 9.7%. Health and life sciences: 384, 15.4%, 7.0%. Semiconductors: 33, 33.3%, 6.1%. Energy: 143, 17.5%, 5.6%. Robotics and automation: 201, 18.4%, 4.5%. Materials and nanotech: 84, 10.7%, 2.4%. Agri-food: 32, 3.1%, 0.0%.

Zero to nineteen percent. A space company that raises a seed round in India is more than four times as likely to reach Series B as a robotics company, and eight times as likely as a materials company. Not one of the 32 seeded agri-food companies has made it.

Treating deep tech as a single category with a 7% graduation rate is therefore not very useful. Two sectors carry the top of the distribution and the rest of the field sits well below the average. Anyone building a deeptech portfolio thesis on the sector average is averaging across an order of magnitude.

Space is the tell

Space is the youngest cohort in that table. Private Indian space companies were barely legal before 2020, IN-SPACe was created that year, and most of the 42 companies were incorporated after the ones they are being compared against. If anything, its 19.0% is understated relative to older sectors that have had longer to graduate.

It is also the sector with a customer.

ISRO, NSIL and IN-SPACe place contracts, transfer technology and authorise launches. A seed-stage Indian space company can point an investor at a signed government order, or at the authorisation that makes one possible. A materials company at the same stage has a data sheet and a hope.

This is the same mechanism we found running through every Western sector that inflected. In the US, SBIR and STTR awarded 8.06 billion dollars in FY2025, 89% of it defence, and the agencies writing those cheques are also the agencies that place production orders afterwards. Europe ran the alternative experiment: the EIC has funded around 706 startups and crowded in roughly three private euros per public euro, and across 2015 to 2025 exactly two VC-backed European deeptech companies remain publicly listed. Grants produce companies. Purchase orders produce graduates.

Note what this implies for the sectors at the bottom of our table. Robotics, materials and agri-food are not obviously worse science than space. They are sectors where nobody in India is obliged to buy the output.

Where India sits, and the surprise in the UK data

The Royal Academy of Engineering and Dealroom publish the same cascade for a 2010-2020 seed cohort, which makes it directly comparable to ours.

To Series A: India deeptech 23.4%, UK deeptech 29.7%, UK non-deeptech 26.9%, US deeptech 33.9%. To Series B: India 7.2%, UK deeptech 12.3%, UK non-deeptech 12.3%, US deeptech 18.7%. Indian space alone, at 19.0%, sits at the US deeptech level.

Read the UK column again, because it inverts the conventional wisdom. UK deep tech does not graduate worse than UK software. It beats it to Series A, 29.7% against 26.9%, and ties it exactly at Series B and Series C. The deep tech penalty in Britain does not appear until Series D, where 1.5% of the original seed cohort arrives against 2.4% for the rest of UK tech, and 4.9% for US deep tech.

In other words, Britain''s deeptech problem is a late-stage capital problem, and it is well diagnosed as one. Every major UK intervention since 2021, Future Fund Breakthrough, LIFTS, the Mansion House Accord, has been aimed at the Series C and D end.

India''s numbers do not have that shape. The gap opens at Series A and compounds from there. If the UK''s answer is to unlock pension money for growth rounds, that is not obviously the medicine for a country whose companies are struggling three rounds earlier.

One caution on the Indian comparator. Venture Intelligence, tracking all Indian startups rather than deeptech, reports 25% seed to Series A and 41% Series A to B for a 2015-2023 cohort, implying roughly 10.3% seed to Series B. That is above our 7.2%. But their window is open and their vintages are pooled differently, so read it as suggestive of a deeptech penalty in India, not as proof of one. It is the same question the reader asked, and it is still open.

What we would take from this

Ask for the denominator. Most published startup graduation numbers are stock ratios dressed as cohort rates, and the two differ by a factor of three to five. We printed one ourselves. If a figure does not state its vintage window and its observation period, it is not comparable to anything.
Deep tech is not a sector for this purpose. The spread inside it, 0% to 19%, is wider than any credible gap between deep tech and the rest of the market. Portfolio construction should happen at sector level or below.
Procurement predicts graduation better than science does. Space is the youngest sector in our data and the best at reaching Series B, and it is the one where the government buys. Robotics, materials and agri-food have no equivalent customer and sit at the bottom.
Do not import the UK diagnosis. Britain''s deeptech companies graduate as well as its software companies until Series D. India''s fall behind at Series A. Growth-stage capital unlocks are the right answer to a British problem and possibly the wrong answer to an Indian one.
The honest position on deeptech versus the rest of India is that nobody knows. We could not establish it, two specifications of our own data disagree, and no published Indian source splits graduation rates by deep tech versus software. That is a gap worth closing, and we intend to close it.

The uncomfortable reading of this piece is that we published a number, a reader pushed on it, and it did not hold in the form we gave it.

The useful reading is that the corrected number is more interesting than the original. 7.2% is not a catastrophe; it is roughly three-fifths of the UK rate and two-fifths of the US rate, in an ecosystem that has been funding deep tech seriously for about five years. And the sector table says the constraint is not Indian science or Indian founders. It is that most Indian deep tech has no first customer.

That is a fixable problem, and it is fixable with procurement rather than with capital.

Methodology

Indian figures are from Deeptech Navigator''s registry as of 5 September 2026. The headline cohort is companies with an MCA incorporation date between 2014 and 2020 whose recorded funding stage is seed or later, measured to September 2026: 525 deep tech companies. Pre-seed, angel and grant-only companies are outside the denominator, and bridge and extension rounds do not count as graduations.

Two limits worth knowing. The sector table runs across all vintages rather than the 2014-2020 window, to keep sample sizes usable; that penalises younger sectors, so space sits at the top of the table despite having the newest companies in it. And the deeptech-versus-control comparison rests on control groups of 46 and 63 companies, which is why this piece reports two contradictory specifications instead of picking one.

UK and US comparators are the Royal Academy of Engineering and Dealroom, State of UK Deep Tech 2025, figures 4.19 and 4.31: a 2010-2020 seed cohort cascading from the original seed denominator, with an open window. Their Series D figures are shares of that original cohort, not stage-to-stage conversions. The all-India comparator is Venture Intelligence''s Series A Landscape Report 2024 edition; the 10.3% seed-to-Series-B figure is our arithmetic from their published 25% and 41%, not a number they print. Carta''s US figures are included for scale but cover companies using Carta for cap table management, which skews to software and to priced institutional rounds.

In our data

Sectors

Space Computing & AI Mobility & Transport Health & Life Sciences Semiconductors Energy Robotics & Industrial Automation Materials & Nanotech Agri & Food

Sources

This briefing is AI-generated from Deeptech Navigator's patent and startup data and lightly reviewed before publishing. Treat it as a starting point, not professional advice - figures are directional, so verify before relying on any number. The platform takes no responsibility for decisions made on it.

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