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Episode 114 · Deep tech · 60 min

Capital is the easy part

TDK Ventures' managing director argues that money is the least interesting thing a deep-tech investor brings. The real product is a "dream syndicate" of financial backers, go-to-market partners and supply-chain strategics that keeps a hardware company alive through years SaaS never has to survive. The proof he keeps returning to is unglamorous: about half the energy in making a battery goes into evaporating one solvent.

Climate & energyVenture capitalDeep tech & hardware
AA
Anil Achyuta
Managing Director, TDK Ventures · with Vishal Krishna
Capital is the easy part · episode thumbnail
59:43
Said in this episode
▶ 32:35
50%
Of battery-making energy spent evaporating solvent
Boiling the NMP solvent out of cathode powders is, in Achyuta's telling, about half the energy cost of manufacturing a cell, and it is the single step a dry-electrode process removes.
▶ 29:50
$480M
US DOE grant to Ascend Elements
Cited as evidence that government money is already flowing into deep-tech scale-up; the figure is as stated on air and covers the company's first factory.
▶ 23:49
5–7 years
Horizon of a first-principles thesis
The FIT method asks who will be the market leader five to seven years out, not who leads today, and pairs it with a "why now" trigger.
▶ 13:12
30 days
US food reserves, as cited
Used to argue that supply-chain resilience belongs inside a deep-tech thesis; the host counters that India stockpiles a year or two, a claim Achyuta declines to confirm.
▶ 36:10
~200°C
The low-temperature heat band nobody funds
Below the thousand-degree-plus steel and cement range sits the steam used for sterilisation, dairy and food processing, which he flags as equally interesting to decarbonise.
▶ 50:30
12–13 days
From stuck part to shipped, via the network
A founder with FDA clearance on a paediatric device had a back-ordered component sourced through TDK's Israel office inside two weeks.
The brief

The argument in sixty seconds

Achyuta's claim is that capital is the commodity in deep tech and the syndicate is the product. Hardware companies do not hockey-stick the way software does, so a cheque on its own buys nothing; what a founder needs is what he calls a dream syndicate: institutional financial investors who can keep following on, go-to-market partners whose real value is telling you where not to go, and ecosystem strategics who bring a supply chain rather than a term sheet. One macro perturbation, he says, can cost a startup two years of runway; the United States holds roughly thirty days of food reserves and its fertiliser inputs come out of Russia, so resilience is a design requirement, not a virtue. The selection method is equally explicit: a first-principles thesis written five to seven years out, asking who is king of the hill by then and, above all, why now: a technology step, a regulation, a macro shock, an interest rate. That is how the fund arrived at flying vehicles, battery recycling, green hydrogen, a German synthetic-aviation-fuel plant riding Europe's 2025 mandate, and a dry-electrode battery process aimed squarely at the solvent-evaporation step that eats half the energy of making a cell. The next thesis is heat, steel and cement above a thousand degrees with dairy and sterilisation at two hundred, and India, a massive steel and cement producer, has more of it than almost anywhere, which is why the Bengaluru office is being built as an open hub rather than a deal desk.

Worth your time if you are

Indian scientists deciding whether to leave the lab
Deep-tech founders assembling a first cap table
Battery and energy-storage engineers
Corporate VCs writing an India thesis
Steel, cement and dairy operators who pay for heat
Episode map

Where the conversation travels

Every block is a chapter, coloured by what it's about. Click any of it to jump straight to that minute on YouTube.

010:00–3:52 · Cold open: a house of science teachers023:52–9:20 · Falling in love with problems, not technology039:20–15:20 · The dream syndicate has three legs0415:20–18:50 · An innovation hub, and the Tesla lesson0518:50–22:40 · Flying, recycling, hydrogen: three bets explained0622:40–27:00 · First principles as a training regime0727:00–30:30 · Why now: regulation, grants and government0830:30–34:20 · Don't burn, don't dig0934:20–36:40 · The next thesis is heat36:40–38:20 · Hydrogen's ledger, and where it wins1138:20–40:25 · Negative prices and the AC/DC fight40:25–41:50 · Sick care is not health care1341:50–45:00 · Roombas in the field, protein in labs1445:00–48:10 · Too fast to keep up1548:10–51:45 · Goodness: value beyond the cheque1651:45–59:43 · Cricket, mathematicians and staying human0:0010:0020:0030:0040:0050:0059:43
Climate & energyVenture capitalDeep tech & hardwareFounder journeyMobility & EVSupply chain & agri
01Cold open: a house of science teachers 0:00 Vishal opens the India deep tech series with a guest he has known for 35 years, who traces his route into deep tech through a family of teachers and then lays out TDK Ventures' two mega-trends, digital transformation and energy transformation, using the phone in the room and the EV in the car park as the illustration. 02Falling in love with problems, not technology 3:52 Not every scientist should be an entrepreneur: the scientist asks what technology enables a heads-up display, the entrepreneur asks what customer pain it removes. Achyuta's own move out of a part-neuroscience, part-chemical-engineering PhD on stealthy brain implants came from realising the work was too far from anyone's life. 03The dream syndicate has three legs 9:20 Patient capital is real rather than mythical because deep tech does not hockey-stick, so his blogged answer is a syndicate of institutional financial investors, go-to-market partners who tell you where not to go, and ecosystem strategics who bring supply chains, a resilience argument he grounds in COVID logistics, 30 days of US food reserves and Russian fertiliser. 04An innovation hub, and the Tesla lesson 15:20 TDK Ventures India is framed as an open innovation hub rather than a closed deal desk, because one perturbation can cost a startup two years of runway, and because the investors who sold Tesla around 2009 kept the downside and lost the entire upside, along with the EV revolution that followed. 05Flying, recycling, hydrogen: three bets explained 18:50 Crediting Vinod Khosla for the experts-are-wrong framing, he argues venture capital was built for exactly these bets, that power law means one investment returns the fund, and walks through electrification end to end: flying vehicles, cathode recycling to cut battery cost, and green hydrogen for petrochemicals, steel and cement. 06First principles as a training regime 22:40 His FIT blog treats thesis-writing like lifting, stable hips before a snatch and results you only see at the end, then defines the work as picking who will be king of the hill in five to seven years by asking where an object comes from, what its supply chain is, and what its energy, mass and water balances are. 07Why now: regulation, grants and government 27:00 Battery weight caps how far an electric aircraft can fly, which led the fund to captured-carbon synthetic aviation fuel from a German company timed to a European mandate. It is proof that "why now" can be a regulation, a macro shock or an interest rate, and that governments are already co-funding this via grants like the $480 million awarded to Ascend Elements. 08Don't burn, don't dig 30:30 He invested in Ascend Elements and AM Batteries when each had fewer than ten people: urban mining recovers nickel, cobalt and cathode precursors so nobody has to dig, while dry powder deposition removes the NMP solvent-evaporation step that consumes about half the energy of battery manufacturing, in a market whose equipment is dangerously concentrated in China. 09The next thesis is heat 34:20 Cathode factories run on whatever the local grid burns, which points at the fund's newest first-principles thesis: capturing industrial heat in heat batteries and turning it back into electrons, across steel and cement above a thousand degrees and the roughly 200-degree steam used for sterilisation, dairy and food, an opening he says is wide in India. 10Hydrogen's ledger, and where it wins 36:40 Round-trip efficiency, compression, transport, invisibility, volatility and the absence of regenerative braking make him doubt hydrogen ever wins the consumer car, while cement, steel, ammonia, fertiliser, petrochemicals, shipping and long-duration storage are where he thinks the molecule is clearly right. 11Negative prices and the AC/DC fight 38:20 Variable renewables now produce negative power prices that a flexible chemical plant can arbitrage, and because fast charging, data centres and electrolysers all want DC, the fund backed a Singapore solid-state transformer company, a rerun, he jokes, of the original AC-versus-DC fight. 12Sick care is not health care 40:25 Most diagnostics are image-based and therefore squarely in AI's path, which he expects to invert the get-sick-then-see-a-doctor model within five to ten years, and he is blunt that diabetes and hypertension have no business being leading causes of death when the missing piece is incentives, not medicine. 13Roombas in the field, protein in labs 41:50 Autonomous tractors already work because a field is a constrained environment with no traffic and no cows, precision irrigation of the kind Fasal does saves water and pesticide, and synthetic milk, meat and poultry are now gated only on taste, after which shelf life becomes a design parameter. 14Too fast to keep up 45:00 Biology has gone from pipetting in a lab coat to something closer to semiconductor manufacturing because computation now drives the innovation cycle, and, with Sora fresh in the news, both men admit the pace is the frightening part, before a detour through DOS, C and outsourcing the non-core writing to AI. 15Goodness: value beyond the cheque 48:10 TDK goodness is defined as everything after the money: pitch refinement before a round, product roadmap feedback, supply-chain resilience reviews, and the day a founder with FDA clearance on a paediatric device and a back-ordered part got it shipped in 12 to 13 days via TDK's Israel office. 16Cricket, mathematicians and staying human 51:45 Cricket paid less than a dollar a game and he says he was good but not good enough, yet the competitiveness transferred: investing is a hyper-competitive sport he can play for another forty years, and a compendium of the greatest mathematicians taught him that the greats are just people, jealousy included, which is why he refuses to be star-struck.
Timeline

The arc, briefly

The transitions Achyuta cites to argue that experts get the timing wrong, and where the fund is looking next.

1905-21Horses to cars in fifteen years. He quotes Vinod Khosla's pair of Central Park photographs: one car among the horses, then one horse among the cars, roughly ten to fifteen years apart. Change arrives faster than anyone plans for.
2006-07The first iPhone. Eighteen years ago, and now it is the object he picks up in the room to explain digital transformation, one of the two mega-trends the fund invests behind. The other is energy, parked outside as an EV.
2009The investors who took their money out of Tesla. They kept what they had made and lost the entire upside, along with the EV revolution that followed and every job and offshoot in it. Deep-tech companies need a longer horizon, and sometimes blossom well after the listing.
2014The Department of Energy's projection, missed. The US DOE had forecast a few thousand EVs shipped by this year while Tesla was already shipping far more, and the figure it had put on 2035 was passed inside three years. Experts reasoning from past data are why he prefers a first-principles thesis written five to seven years out.
2025Europe mandates the fuel. A rule requiring sustainable aviation fuel is the reason TDK Ventures backed a German company making it from captured carbon and green hydrogen. That is what a why-now looks like: a regulation, a macro shock or an interest rate, rather than a technology on its own.
TodayThe next thesis is heat. Steel and cement plants throw away high-grade thermal energy above a thousand degrees, and the roughly 200-degree steam used for sterilisation, dairy and food is a second band nobody funds. India makes a great deal of both, which is why the Bengaluru office is being built as an open innovation hub rather than a deal desk.
Takeaways

Ideas to carry out of this hour

01

Entrepreneurs fall in love with problems; scientists fall in love with technology

Achyuta is careful to say not every scientist should start a company, since advanced science and applied science are both legitimate careers. The dividing line he draws is behavioural: shown the same idea, a display with no wearable, the scientist asks which technology enables it while the entrepreneur asks which customer's pain it removes, and then goes hunting for the noisy industrial site where people already wear helmets. His own exit from a part-neuroscience, part-chemical-engineering PhD on stealthy brain implants came from the same instinct: the work was excellent and far too distant from anyone's life.

▶ 4:39▶ 5:10▶ 8:08
02

Deep tech needs a syndicate, not an investor

Because hardware does not hockey-stick the way software does, no single cheque survives the journey, so the blogged answer is a three-legged dream syndicate. Institutional financial investors supply capital that can keep following on; go-to-market partners earn their keep mainly by saying where not to go, so the electrolyser company does not waste a decade trying to power cars; ecosystem strategics bring the battery supply chain or the glass supplier that a term sheet cannot. He publishes the recipe deliberately, on the grounds that keeping company-building a secret helps nobody.

▶ 10:06▶ 11:24▶ 14:34
03

Resilience is a design requirement, not a virtue

One macro perturbation, he says, can erase two years of a startup's runway, which is why supply-chain depth sits inside the investment thesis rather than beside it. His examples are deliberately alarming: the United States carries roughly thirty days of food reserves, and the world's nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium flow out of Russia, so a single geopolitical shock can take a country down long before it takes a company down. Partners who can re-route a supply chain are therefore part of the capital stack.

▶ 13:06▶ 13:33▶ 16:35
04

"Why now" is the question that decides the bet

The FIT method, a first-principles investment thesis, is written five to seven years forward, asking who will be king of the hill by then rather than who leads today. But the discipline that keeps it from being guesswork is the timing question: there has to be an impetus, whether a technology step, a regulation, a macro shock or an interest rate. The synthetic-aviation-fuel investment is the worked example: batteries are too heavy to fly far, captured carbon plus green hydrogen makes a drop-in fuel, and a European mandate arriving in 2025 supplies the why-now.

▶ 23:49▶ 28:21▶ 28:37
05

The battery's hidden cost is evaporating a solvent

Everyone photographs the robots on a cell line; Achyuta points at the step nobody films. Cathode powders arrive carrying a solvent called NMP, and boiling it off accounts for roughly half the energy cost of making the battery. Remove the step, deposit dry powder straight onto foil almost like 3D printing, then stack and roll, and the cell gets cheaper without touching the chemistry, which is the only fast lever on mass-market EV pricing. The second, quieter risk he names is that most battery-manufacturing equipment comes from one country.

▶ 32:25▶ 33:15▶ 33:40
06

Heat is the next thesis, and India has the most of it

The fund is now writing a first-principles thesis on decarbonising heat, on the logic that steel and cement plants throw away enormous quantities of high-grade thermal energy that a heat battery could store and convert back into electrons. Two bands matter: the thousand-degree-plus industrial range, and a low-temperature band around 200 degrees that runs steam sterilisation, dairy and food processing. Asked whether an Indian startup can play here, he is unequivocal: India is a massive steel and cement producer, so the heat is already on the ground.

▶ 35:09▶ 35:45▶ 36:10
07

Hydrogen loses the car and wins the furnace

His objection to hydrogen cars is a ledger, not a preference: poor round-trip efficiency converting hydrogen back to electrons, the need to compress it, the cost of transporting it, a gas you can neither see nor smell, and a one-way reaction with no regenerative braking to recover anything. He concedes Toyota would disagree. Where he thinks the molecule is unambiguously right is industry: cement, steel, ammonia and fertiliser, petrochemicals, plus maritime shipping and long-duration storage, which is precisely where the green-hydrogen thesis was pointed.

▶ 36:44▶ 37:16▶ 38:04
08

The network, not the cheque, is what a corporate VC actually sells

TDK goodness is his name for everything that happens after the money: helping founders refine a pitch before they raise, feeding back on product roadmaps, stress-testing supply chains, and opening customer doors. The story he tells is a founder with FDA clearance on a paediatric device and a back-ordered part. A phone call to TDK's Israel office had the component shipped in 12 to 13 days. The compounding version is community: two portfolio founders sharing a car ride have repeatedly come out the other end with a collaboration nobody engineered.

▶ 48:33▶ 50:09▶ 51:10
The numbers, drawn

What the episode measures

Every figure below was said on air, with timestamps included and caveats kept.

The step nobody films

making a cathode, the wet way and the dry way
The wet process mix in NMP coat the foil boil it off last step: about half the energy of making a cell The dry process dry powder onto foil stack and roll same chemistry, cheaper cell Most equipment for either comes from one country.
Everyone photographs the robots on a cell line. Achyuta points at the solvent: cathode powders arrive carrying NMP, and boiling it off is, in his telling, about half the energy cost of the cell. Remove it and the price falls without touching the chemistry.▶ 32:35

The two heat bands a thesis has to cover

°C
Steel and cement1,000Sterilising and food200
Approximations given in passing: "a thousand degrees plus" for heavy industry and "about 200 degrees" for steam sterilisation and food; the steel figure is a stated floor, not a ceiling.▶ 36:10

The three legs of a dream syndicate

what a hardware founder needs standing around the cheque
Institutional financial investors capital that can follow on, round after round Go-to-market partners whose real job is telling you where not to go Ecosystem strategics with a battery supply chain or a glass supplier Hardware has no hockey stick, so cheques repeat.
He publishes the recipe on the fund's blog deliberately, on the grounds that keeping company-building a secret helps nobody. The go-to-market leg is the one he rates highest: it stops an electrolyser company spending a decade trying to power cars.▶ 10:06

Hydrogen's ledger

where he thinks the molecule loses, and where it clearly wins
Loses: the car Wins: the furnace poor round-trip efficiency cement and steel it has to be compressed ammonia and fertiliser it costs a lot to move petrochemicals you cannot see or smell it maritime shipping no regenerative braking long-duration storage He concedes Toyota would dispute the left column.
His objection to the hydrogen car is an accounting one rather than a preference. The right column is where the fund pointed its green-hydrogen thesis.▶ 36:44
Worth keeping

Lines that stay

If you meet the greatest entrepreneurs, what they'll tell you is: I'm looking for a problem. They don't care about the technology.

▶ 5:10

Can you imagine how barbaric this sounds — we are burning stuff. We're in the 21st century. If aliens came in and saw us burning coal, they'd be surprised.

▶ 25:59

What we have today is sick care. We don't have health care. Everybody gets sick and then goes to the doctor — I think that's all going to reverse.

▶ 40:37

I'm scared that I'm not able to keep up with the science. It is that fast.

▶ 44:35

I'm happy that I can now play this sport for another 40 years — whereas if I was an IPL cricketer I'd have fizzled out by about 35.

▶ 54:15
Clips that travel

Short on time? Start here

Deep-tech founders assembling a first cap table

The three legs of a dream syndicate

The full recipe: financial investors, go-to-market partners who say where not to go, ecosystem strategics, plus the 30-days-of-food argument for why resilience belongs inside a thesis.

9:57 → 15:20 · 5 min ▶ Watch clip
Corporate VCs writing an India thesis

Why the experts got Tesla wrong

Selling Tesla in 2009, the power law that lets one investment return a fund, and how electrification-end-to-end produced flying vehicles, battery recycling and green hydrogen.

16:40 → 22:40 · 6 min ▶ Watch clip
Battery and energy-storage engineers

Don't burn, don't dig

Urban mining for nickel, cobalt and cathode precursors, and the solvent-evaporation step that quietly eats half the energy of making a cell.

30:30 → 34:20 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip
Steel, cement and dairy operators who pay for heat

Heat, hydrogen and the AC/DC fight

The newest first-principles thesis laid out live: heat batteries, the 1,000°C and 200°C bands, hydrogen's honest ledger, and why negative power prices are an arbitrage.

34:20 → 40:25 · 6 min ▶ Watch clip
Founders choosing between a strategic and a financial investor

Value beyond capital, in 13 days

What a corporate VC's network is actually worth, told through a paediatric device stuck on a back-ordered part, and the car rides that turn a portfolio into a community.

48:10 → 51:45 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip
Glossary

The jargon, unpacked

Dream syndicate
Achyuta's term for the three-part backing a deep-tech company needs: institutional financial investors, go-to-market partners, and ecosystem strategics who bring supply chains rather than only money.
Patient capital
Money that accepts a long, non-hockey-stick growth curve, which he treats as a real necessity in deep tech rather than a fundraising myth, since the upside can arrive years after an IPO.
FIT (first-principles investment thesis)
TDK Ventures' method of reasoning from an object's supply chain, energy, mass and water balances to who will lead a market in five to seven years, and what makes now the moment.
NMP solvent evaporation
The step in conventional battery manufacturing where the solvent carrying the cathode powder is boiled off; Achyuta puts it at roughly half the energy cost of making a cell.
Urban mining
Recovering nickel, cobalt, manganese and cathode precursors from used batteries instead of extracting them from the ground, making the materials loop rather than deplete.
Sustainable aviation fuel
A drop-in jet fuel synthesised from captured carbon plus green hydrogen: the route the fund took once battery weight capped how far an electric aircraft could fly.
Solid-state transformer
A compact power-electronics device converting between AC and DC at grid nodes; it matters because fast charging, data centres and electrolysers all run on DC.
Heat battery
A store that captures industrial heat or steam and releases it later as heat or electricity. It is the core mechanism in the decarbonising-heat thesis being written now.
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