Why Speciale Invest believes investors should give founders freedom to fail quietly
At TechSparks Bengaluru, Speciale Invest investors and M2P Fintech co-founder argued that deeptech demands investors willing to “lose with founders”—backing slow, invisible creation over quick returns.
In India’s deeptech trenches, the only metric that matters is endurance: investors who want real creation must be willing to lose with their founders, absorbing quiet failures and long silences until the invisible work compounds into a breakthrough.
This was the central thread of a recent panel discussion at YourStory's flagship startup summit, TechSparks 2025 Bengaluru, where Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao of Speciale Invest, along with M2P Fintech co-founder Prabhu Rangarajan, dissected what it takes to build India's deeptech ecosystem.
“We’re not on the board to protect our interests,” Rajaram said in the panel discussion moderated by YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma. “We’re there to add value."
Rao also emphasised that the real payoff is value creation.“I mean, we're making money on the side," he noted.
Betting on the long arc
In an ecosystem obsessed with blitz-scaling and unicorn counts, Speciale’s approach is much more patient. The firm invests in technologies that take years—sometimes a decade—to become commercially viable: semiconductors, quantum cryptography, rockets.
The firm was among the first institutional backers of Agnikul Cosmos, a Chennai-based startup building 3D-printed rocket engines.
Six months after writing the first cheque, when the startup’s founders couldn’t attend a satellite conference in the US due to visa issues, Rao flew there himself. “He showed up with an Agnikul tag,” Rajaram quipped, “and came back with an Excel sheet of 200 small-satellite makers who could be prospective customers."
The Speciale Invest partners also asserted that investors cannot measure deeptech founders every quarter like a SaaS startup. "Companies in the early stages, in the first four or five years, if you have to build something, you have to be patient,” noted Rajaram, adding that neither would deeptech founders want to answer every quarter to investors, nor many investors would be willing to underwrite the check.
“In India, we’re all very impatient,” he added, “We like returns quickly, therefore we don’t like things that take time. We’re worried about failure."
“In deeptech, you do ten things of which only one or two pass. Then you take those one or two, again do ten combinations, again one or two pass. By the time it hits level four or five, you’ve already tried 100 things — and only two or three actually make it to market. People need the patience to do 100 things,” Rao explained
Rao says learning about the tech they are backing is a key motivating factor. “When we work with founders,” Rao said, “it’s not about 30 or 40 board meetings. It’s about making sure we are educated as much as possible about what they’re doing and what challenges they face. The more educated we are, the more patience we can derive for ourselves—and for the ecosystem.”
For Prabhu Rangarajan, Co-founder of M2P Fintech, that empathy has real weight. “We stayed underground for a couple of years, rebuilding,” he said. “If we’d raised money early, we would have been forced to show outcomes every quarter. Sometimes you need the freedom to fail quietly.”
Rajaram agreed. “Deeptech can give you non-linear outcomes,” he said. “But they’re not linear, they’re step-ups every time. The part both sides of the ecosystem need to learn is how to communicate that—that the real outcome is often invisible for years.”
Edited by Kanishk Singh