The RDI Fund's 19 New Managers Get ₹7,131 Crore. The Companies They Back Raised ₹2,823 Crore Last Year.

On 12 October the government announced the first cohort of second-level fund managers for the ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund. The Empowered Group of Secretaries approved them at its meeting of 8 October: 14 alternative investment funds (AIFs) and 5 focused research organisations (FROs), with a total RDI Fund commitment of ₹7,131 crore, or about ₹375 crore per manager on average. They are to finance companies working at Technology Readiness Level 4 and above, and are expected to raise private capital equal to the RDI Fund's contribution.

Until now the scheme had two managers, the Technology Development Board and BIRAC. This cohort opens the equity route that most startups use. We looked at which deep-tech companies on our list these 19 managers already reach, and set their commitment against the private rounds on our record.

Who the 19 are

The government's release names none of the 19, and the scheme's own list of managers still shows only TDB and BIRAC (checked 17 October). The names below come from the press. Inc42 named 13 AIFs: Blume Ventures, Speciale Invest, Chiratae Ventures, YourNest Capital Advisors, Sixth Sense Ventures, Celesta India, AdvantEdge Investment Managers, IvyCap Ventures, Ideaspring Capital Fund, TVS Capital Funds, AMA Capital Advisors, Translation Endeavors and one it calls only "Campus". CXO Digital Pulse and GKToday add Kalaari Capital, which makes 14. No source says which fund "Campus" is, so we leave it out of our counts.

Inc42 also named the five research bodies: ARTPARK, the AI and robotics park at IISc Bengaluru; C-CAMP in Bengaluru; IIT Madras Research Park; PIEDS at BITS Pilani; and SINE at IIT Bombay. All five are incubators, so their reach is mostly early-stage companies.

What the five research bodies reach

Across the five, 128 deep-tech companies on our list are linked as incubatees or investees. Health and life sciences accounts for 72 of them, driven by C-CAMP, where 43 of 50 are health companies. SINE has the widest spread, with robotics and mobility alongside health. ARTPARK's nine lean towards drones, robots and mobility.

Private money is thin. Only 45 of the 128 have a private round on our record, and those rounds add up to ₹527 crore, of which ₹165 crore is one company, Eyestem Research, which is also in TDB's first RDI cohort. Most of the rest are pre-seed and seed companies; the managers will be funding the step after incubation.

What the 14 venture funds reach

The 13 AIFs we can identify are linked to 149 deep-tech companies on our list. Blume Ventures, Speciale Invest and IvyCap Ventures account for the most. Three of them, TVS Capital Funds, AMA Capital Advisors and Translation Endeavors, have none matched on our list. Only one company, FLO Mobility, is linked both to a research body (ARTPARK) and to one of the funds (Blume's founders fund).

The overlap with the RDI Fund's earlier choices is already visible. Nine of the 21 companies from TDB's first cohort on our list are linked to a new manager: six to Speciale Invest (Agnikul Cosmos, e-TRNL Energy, GalaxEye, Peptris, QNu Labs and The ePlane Company), ThinkMetal to YourNest, ideaForge to Celesta and Eyestem Research to C-CAMP.

₹7,131 crore against a year of private equity rounds

In the past 12 months, deep-tech companies on our list closed 240 named private equity rounds on our record, at 226 companies, leaving out debt and listed companies' share issues. The 203 with a disclosed amount add up to ₹21,696 crore at ₹83 to the dollar, and the five largest, led by Yotta's $200 million pre-IPO round, make up ₹6,242 crore of it. The RDI Fund's ₹7,131 crore is 33% of that total. If the managers raise the matching private capital they are expected to, the pool becomes ₹14,262 crore, 66% of a year of private deep-tech equity rounds on our record.

The companies these 19 managers already reach raised less. The 276 linked companies closed 38 named rounds in the past year, worth ₹2,823 crore where disclosed. Nearly all of that went to AIF-linked companies; the research bodies' companies closed five rounds worth ₹112 crore, ₹50 crore of it Eyestem's. The commitment is about 2.5 times what the managers' existing companies raised in a year, so much of the money will have to find companies these managers do not yet back, or go into larger rounds. The commitment will be drawn over each fund's life, not in one year, which narrows the gap.

Where the reach is: three states, and health

The 276 companies are 1.0% of the 28,865 deep-tech companies on our list, and they are concentrated. Karnataka has 110 of them (40%), against 14.7% of the list. Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu together have 206, or 75%, against 42.5% of the list. Delhi has 15, Telangana 9, Uttar Pradesh 9 and Gujarat 7, though each of those states has more than 2,100 deep-tech companies on our list.

By sector, health and life sciences has 100 of the 276 (36%), almost double its 19.4% share of the list, because three of the five research bodies are health-heavy incubators. Space has 14 (5.1% against 2.1%). AI has 20 (7.2% against 10.5%), and semiconductors and quantum have 4 and 6. A manager can only finance what it finds, and on this evidence the first cohort will find most of its companies in the southern and western hubs where it already works.

What to watch

Four things. The official list of the 19, with each manager's commitment, which neither the release nor the scheme's site gives yet. The five additional technologies the Empowered Group approved, which the release does not name. The first investments, and whether they go to companies outside the managers' current portfolios. And the next cohorts: the government says it will onboard more, and close to 200 applicants were waiting before this round.

How we counted

Deep-tech companies are Startup India companies with a yes or maybe deep-tech verdict in our data, not merged and not closed, 28,865 in all, with one used-car marketplace set aside as not deep tech in substance, by registered state and our primary sector tag. A company is linked to a manager when our profile data or a funding round on our record names the manager as incubator or investor, matched by name; a link is not a confirmed current holding. For IIT Madras Research Park we counted the IIT Madras Incubation Cell and the IIT Madras bioincubator, which it houses; no record names the Research Park itself.

Private rounds are verified rounds on our record, compiled from public reports, excluding grants, RDI rounds, debt facilities and listed companies' preferential issues and IPOs; pre-IPO rounds of unlisted companies are kept and named as such. Where two records describe one round, we count it once. Past-year figures count only named rounds; company-level estimates of total raised are left out because they are lifetime totals. The research bodies' lifetime figures take the estimated total or the sum of named rounds, whichever is larger, never both. Where a round's amount is held only in rupees or in millions, we convert it; dollar amounts are converted to rupees at ₹83. Many rounds have no disclosed amount, so every rupee figure here is a floor. Links come partly from funding news, so linked companies are more likely than others to have a round on record.

In our data

Sources

• PIB: Research, Development and Innovation Fund Announces First Cohort of 19 Second Level Fund Managers (12 October 2026) ↗
• Inc42: Blume, Speciale Invest and 11 other AIFs selected for deploying ₹7,131 Cr under RDI Fund (12 and 14 October 2026) ↗
• CXO Digital Pulse: India selects 19 fund managers to deploy ₹7,131 crore under RDI Fund (14 October 2026) ↗
• GKToday: RDIF announces first cohort of 19 fund managers (13 October 2026) ↗
• The Tribune: RDIF approves 19 fund managers with Rs 7,131 crore commitment (12 October 2026) ↗
• Analytics India Magazine: India's ₹1 lakh crore RDI Fund approves 19 fund managers (13 October 2026) ↗
• RDI Fund (ANRF): second-level fund managers list (checked 17 October 2026) ↗