I have sat across the table from hundreds of deeptech founders over the past three years. A growing number of them are building for defence. What strikes me most is not the sophistication of what they are building, though that is genuinely impressive. It is how many of them did not set out to build for defence at all.
A founder solving precision sensing for agricultural drones discovers their core technology has direct applications in surveillance systems. A team building swarm coordination for industrial logistics realises the same architecture works for autonomous defence platforms. This convergence is not accidental. It is what happens when you build genuinely deep technology. It finds its own applications, including ones you did not anticipate.
India's defence deeptech story is being written by exactly these kinds of founders. And the numbers are beginning to reflect it. Indigenous defence production touched a record high in FY 2025-26. Defence exports crossed an all-time peak in the same year. The private sector's share of that production has reached its highest ever level. None of this happened because large contractors suddenly became more innovative. It happened because the base of the ecosystem widened, and startups became real contributors rather than peripheral participants.
What iDEX changed and what still needs to change
The Innovations for Defence Excellence initiative was a genuine inflexion point. For the first time, startups had a structured, policy-backed pathway into defence procurement. ADITI has taken this further, targeting thirty specific deeptech areas with defence and export potential. These frameworks matter enormously because defence deeptech has a fundamental economics problem that most startup support structures were not designed to solve.
Hardware-heavy innovation does not compress into the fast iteration cycles that software investors are comfortable with. Capital requirements are higher. Payback periods are longer. A founder building an AI-powered radar system or an autonomous underwater vehicle cannot pivot to a new market in 90 days if the first approach does not work. They need patient capital, structured institutional support, and a credible path from prototype to procurement. Not just a grant and good luck.
Running accelerator programmes for deeptech startups, including those working on defence applications, has given us a ground-level view of where this breaks down. The startups that struggle most are rarely the ones with weak technology. They are the ones with strong technology and no access to the right stakeholders, no understanding of how defence procurement actually works, and no institutional support to bridge the gap between a working prototype and a fielded system.
The ecosystem layer of defence deeptech is missing
Policy has moved faster than ecosystem infrastructure in this space. iDEX and ADITI have created demand-side pull. What has not kept pace is the supply-side support. The mentorship from people who have navigated long government sales cycles. The structured access to testing infrastructure. The platforms that connect a founder in Pune or Coimbatore to the right decision makers in the defence establishment.
This is the unglamorous work that determines whether a promising technology actually reaches the people who need it. It is less visible than a funding announcement or a defence expo showcase. But in our experience working with deeptech founders across sectors and geographies, it is often the deciding factor between a startup that scales and one that runs out of runway with a world-class technology sitting in a laboratory.
The talent challenge compounds this further. Engineers who understand both cutting-edge AI and the operational realities of defence environments are genuinely scarce. Building that talent pipeline requires universities, research institutions, and industry to work together in ways that India's innovation ecosystem has historically struggled to sustain.
What the next chapter requires
India's defence deeptech ambitions are real, and the policy momentum behind them is the strongest it has ever been. Positive indigenisation lists have created guaranteed domestic demand. The defence budget has grown substantially. The export targets for the end of the decade are ambitious but not unrealistic given the trajectory of the past two years.
What will determine whether those ambitions are met is not policy intent. It is ecosystem depth. The startups working in this space today are technically capable and genuinely motivated. What they need around them is infrastructure that connects capability to opportunity faster than it currently does. Infrastructure that gets the right founder in front of the right stakeholder at the right stage. Infrastructure that provides the patient institutional support that defence deeptech inherently requires.
We are watching the early shape of how India builds its own strategic technological depth. The production numbers suggest the ecosystem is maturing. The work now is to make sure that maturity reaches the founders who are building the hardest problems, not just the ones who already know how to navigate the system.
(The author is the founder and CEO of SanchiConnect. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)
