India's deep-tech story has reached an important inflection point. For years, much of the conversation was about whether the country could produce world-class research, build intellectual property and attract enough investment into frontier technologies. Today, those questions have largely been answered. The bigger question now is what happens after an invention is made. Can India turn scientific breakthroughs into products, businesses and globally competitive industries?
The evidence suggests that India has become significantly better at creating knowledge. Patent applications crossed the one lakh mark for the first time in FY25, with 110,375 applications filed, a nearly 20% increase over the previous year. More than 68,000 of these were filed by Indian residents, pointing to a growing culture of domestic innovation.
India has also climbed steadily in the Global Innovation Index, improved its standing in global university rankings, and established itself as one of the world's largest producers of scientific research. These are not small changes. They reflect years of investment in research capacity and institutional capability.
There has also been a change in who is funding this innovation. Private industry now accounts for a significant share of India's gross expenditure on research and development, reflecting a shift in how innovation is financed. For decades, India's research ecosystem depended predominantly on public funding. Today, industry is increasingly investing in creating new technologies, signalling a growing role for the private sector in India's innovation ecosystem.
But innovation, by itself, does not create economic value.
A patent is only the beginning of a commercial journey. It creates value when someone licenses it, manufactures it, integrates it into a product or buys it. That journey, from laboratory to marketplace, remains India's biggest deep-tech challenge.
The numbers reveal this gap clearly. Patent holders are required to disclose whether their inventions are being commercially worked through Form 27 filings. Despite a rapidly expanding patent base, only a relatively small share of patents are reported as commercially worked. Licensing and assignment registrations also remain a fraction of the total stock of patents in force. India is building intellectual property faster than it is building markets that can absorb it.
This is not a scientific problem. It is a commercialization problem.
The good news is that commercialization requires a different set of levers from scientific discovery. Scientific breakthroughs take years of experimentation and involve a great deal of uncertainty. Commercialization, on the other hand, depends on policy support, patient capital and, most importantly, customers willing to adopt new technology. These are challenges India has solved before.
The Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme is one of the clearest acknowledgements of this reality. Rather than focusing solely on funding basic research, the scheme is designed to support technologies that have already demonstrated technical feasibility but still need financial backing to become commercially viable. It targets precisely the stage where many deep-tech startups struggle: the long and expensive journey from prototype to product.
The defence ecosystem offers another example of why commercialization matters. Through Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX), hundreds of startups have received opportunities to develop indigenous technologies. But the real measure of success is not the number of development contracts awarded. It is the number of technologies that ultimately receive procurement orders.
Procurement creates revenue, validates technology and builds investor confidence. DRDO's technology transfer programmes offer a similar lesson. When there are clear pathways between research institutions and industry, innovation is far more likely to reach the market.
India's manufacturing journey reinforces the same point. The Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme succeeded because it did more than offer financial incentives. It created confidence around long-term demand and encouraged companies to invest in expanding manufacturing capacity across strategic sectors. As of March 2026, the PLI schemes had attracted over Rs 2.40 lakh crore in investments, generated more than 14 lakh jobs, and driven substantial growth in domestic manufacturing.
Deep-tech commercialization requires a similar demand-side push. Investors are far more willing to back frontier technologies when they can see credible customers at the end of the development cycle.
From an investor's perspective, this is where India's next opportunity lies.
Software startups can achieve product-market fit relatively quickly. Deep-tech companies rarely have that luxury. Their development cycles are longer, the technical risks are higher and the capital requirements are significantly larger. At the same time, these companies can create defensible intellectual property, strategic technologies and globally competitive businesses.
Supporting them requires investors with longer time horizons. It requires institutions willing to finance translational research. And it requires procurement systems that reward indigenous innovation rather than established incumbents.
Perhaps the single most important customer is the government itself.
Across defence, healthcare, clean energy and advanced manufacturing, government procurement can provide the first commercial validation that turns a promising technology into a viable business. One purchase order can often matter more than 10 research grants because it shows that an innovation has found a market.
India has already spent two decades strengthening its innovation ecosystem. It has built research institutions, encouraged entrepreneurship, expanded access to capital and created one of the world's fastest-growing startup ecosystems. Those investments are beginning to show results.
The next phase of India's deep-tech journey will not be defined by how many patents it files. It will be defined by how many of those patents become globally competitive products and companies.
Science exists. The talent exists. Increasingly, the capital exists.
The missing piece is commercialization.
That should be encouraging. Building markets is considerably easier than discovering new science. India has already shown that when policy, capital and demand move in the same direction, industries can scale rapidly. Deep-tech now needs that same coordinated push.
India doesn't have an innovation problem any more. It has a commercialization opportunity. Solving it could define the country's next decade of technological leadership.
Amit Chand is founder of BYT Capital