Venture Studio NOW Earmarks $2 Mn To Scale Up Indian Deeptech-Led Climate Tech Startups

Climate tech venture studio NOW on Thursday (March 7) announced its official launch in India with a dedicated $2 Mn fund to invest in early stage Indian deeptech startups. 

NOW, which touts itself as the country’s first climate tech venture studio, said in a statement it will invest in and “co-build” three to four startups in the next 12-18 months. Under the initiative, the venture studio will invest $250K to $500K each in the selected deeptech-led sustainability and climate tech startups.

For the uninitiated, venture studios, unlike accelerators and incubators, collaborate with founders right from the beginning (ideation phase) all the way to helping raise funds, offering expertise and figuring out product-market fit (PMF).

The studio said it will initially focus on areas such as industrial and supply chain decarbonisation, energy, EV and mobility, agri and food, circular economy, low carbon materials, among others.

“NOW’s vision is to build category leaders in sustainability and climate tech by leveraging deeptech and deep science-led innovations. We are looking for bold, disruptive and audacious entrepreneurs or founders with an idea/patent/prototype who are committed to solving and building for critical areas of sustainability and climate,” said NOW founder Gayathri Kuppendra Reddy.

NOW aims to partner early-stage deeptech startups and offer them mentorship, funding, guidance on product-market fit, corporate partnerships for prototype validation, and access to climate tech experts. 

With a core team comprising members from climate tech, SaaS, and venture capital, the venture studio will primarily focus on early-stage deeptech startups that require heavy capital to test prototypes and scale up solutions.

“NOW operates in a venture studio model, whereby we accelerate the journey of a founder from idea-to-revenue through a unique de-risking methodology, hands-on entrepreneurial co-building, and milestone based funding,” said Pradeep V, partner at NOW.

The development comes at a time when the venture studio model is witnessing growing traction among Indian founders. As investors tighten their purse strings amid the ongoing capital drought, more and more budding entrepreneurs are looking at alternative ways to raise capital and scale their operations up from scratch. 

This has spawned a growing number of venture studios that are focussed on a particular niche.

Just last year, boutique investment advisory firm CaHa Capital launched a climate tech and climate finance-focussed venture studio, VAIA Climate Studio. Prior to that in June 2023, healthcare-focussed venture studio 2070 Health raised $30 Mn as part of its seed funding round from US-based VC firm W Health Ventures. 

At the heart of this is India’s growing deeptech and climate tech opportunity. As per a report, the climate tech market in India and the larger South East Asia (SEA) region isd projected to grow to a market size of $350 Bn by 2030.