Yashwanth Hemaraj

From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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The India Deep Tech Investment Alliance (IDTA), was announced yesterday by Celesta Capital's Sriram Viswanathan at the opening session of Semicon India in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Electronics & Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, MEITy Secretary S Krishnan, and other government and business leaders. The synergies of talent in the U.S.-India corridor, combined with appropriate financing and expertise, can create globally successful enterprises from India. https://lnkd.in/g6NjdRrH

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Venture Capital has to reinvent itself for ai. Ai ventures need very little capital for core technology and “coal power plant like”funding for infrastructure. Both don’t work for the current Vc model. Sandhill Road venture capital is in dire straits. Their playbook which is borrowed from Hollywood depends on a Hollywood studio type concentration of power. In place of Warner brothers, fox, universal, Disney etc they created Microsoft, meta, Google, Amazon etc. And then Netflix came along and ate the lunch of the studios disrupting the industry with an integrated model which eliminated all intermediaries and offered an “eat all you can”. Now if an AI super app from India were to do the same to all foundational models - it would eliminate all hope of recovering the Rs 2,000 crore pa salary packages doing the rounds of the valley. Venture Capital was about creating hype - multiple firms backing one horse - and that horse then buying everyone that mattered. Microsoft did that and then the others followed. The playbook was kill or acquire. And hire lots of lobbyists for regulatory capture. And criminals if required. That playbook is no longer going to work. For the past decade, Indian venture capital has chased billion-dollar outcomes. Unicorns became the scoreboard. But economies are not built by a few giant explosions. They are built by millions of small pops. The ten or twelve venture capital companies that do popcorns are quiet and hidden. They generate a return on investment more than drugs or prostitution. And have no need for external capital. The others are all smoke with little fire. And are desperately looking to offload their overpriced purchases. The unsuspecting retail investor is one Guinea pig. Unicorn investing concentrates capital into a tiny number of companies. Popcorn investing spreads capital across thousands of ₹10 crore, ₹50 crore, ₹200 crore businesses. The former creates valuations and bubbles. The latter creates employment and sustainable businesses. A single unicorn may employ 3,000 people. But 100,000 smaller companies employing 10 people each create 1 million jobs. That is the scale India actually needs. More importantly, popcorn companies build real capability — manufacturing firms, component suppliers, specialized engineering companies, regional service providers. These businesses rarely reach billion-dollar valuations. But they form the industrial backbone of a nation. They spawn an ecosystem. Germany did not rise on unicorns. China did not start with tech giants. It started with thousands of small factories. The United States did not become an innovation powerhouse through a handful of startups, but through decades of dense entrepreneurial layers. Unicorns are peaks. Popcorn is the mountain. India’s future will not be determined by how many billion-dollar companies it creates, but by how many hundred-crore profitable companies it produces. We don’t need more unicorn hunters. We need more popcorn makers.

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