India is ready to design for the world, says Dassault Systèmes' Sudarshan Mogasale

As 120 Indian startups prepare to fly to France for Bharat Innovates 2026, one of the people watching them closely is convinced India's moment has arrived. In a conversation with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, Sudarshan Mogasale, CEO of Dassault Systèmes Solutions Lab (India), said that deep tech in India is no longer a catch-up game but the country's defining phase of innovation. Why does that carry weight? Because the man making the case runs the India research arm of one of the world's biggest engineering-software companies, and he believes the country is ready to move from building things to designing them.

Why deep tech in India is having its moment

Dassault Systèmes is the French company behind much of the software used to design everything from aircraft to cars, and its Solutions Lab is the firm's research and engineering base in India, out of Pune. Mogasale, a former ISRO engineer with more than two decades in the field, began with a simple fact. India produces around 15 lakh engineers a year, the largest such talent pool in the world, and channelling it into deep tech is now central to the country's self-reliance in technology. When Shradha asked why the conversation should move from making in India to designing in India, he did not hesitate. The real power, he said, lies in becoming a creator of original thought, an innovation hub that produces new products and solutions rather than only manufacturing someone else's. That, in his view, is where the future sits.

India and France, better together

That ambition, he argued, cannot be built in isolation. When Shradha asked what India and France can learn from each other, Mogasale said deep tech always depends on a web of foundational and component technologies, which makes partnering with countries that already have them essential. He called India the workforce of the future for the entire world, and described Bharat Innovates 2026, an initiative of the Ministry of Education, as a moment to cherish. His read on the cohort was warm. Asked to judge, dispassionately, the 120 startups heading to Nice from 14 to 16 June 2026, he said the selection had been done well, that the companies are among the best he has seen, and that studying them had given him fresh ideas. Dassault already backs a couple of them through its startup programme, the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab.

What a virtual twin actually is

One idea Shradha asked him to unpack for a general audience was the virtual twin. In plain terms, Mogasale described it as a digital replica of a physical object, a table, a chair, an aircraft, anything, captured inside the computer with its shape, its behaviour and even the way it is manufactured.

The point of it is speed and savings. Building a new product physically means burning time, effort and money on one iteration after another. Do that same optimisation digitally, powered by AI, and you can test far more versions, faster and at lower cost.

That, he said, is why a virtual twin is the engineering power to create the new world.

The best time to be an engineer

For all the talk of disruption, Mogasale's message to young engineers was optimistic. This is the best time to be an engineer, he said, because AI is stripping away routine work and opening up options beyond human imagination, leaving people freer to be creative. The result, he predicted, will be small companies building large-impact products and a wave of Indian entrepreneurs solving hard problems. His advice was to stay confident, experiment, and lean on government policies and industry partners. The bigger prize, he added, is deployment. The world is full of clever AI models, but only a small number of people actually put them to use, and India, with its engineering depth, is well placed to make that technology work for businesses and societies everywhere. As its startups head to France, that is the conviction India carries with it.