From AI to spacetech, India is entering an era where deep technology will shape industries, infrastructure, mobility, defence, and everyday life
As India marks National Technology Day, the conversation around innovation is shifting from digital convenience to deep technological transformation. The next decade is expected to be defined not just by software platforms or consumer apps, but by foundational technologies such as AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, drones, EVs, robotics, spacetech, industrial automation, and defence tech.
Across sectors, industry leaders believe India is moving from being a services-driven economy to becoming a global hub for engineering-led innovation and industrial intelligence. Whether it is intelligent infrastructure, predictive logistics, smart manufacturing, cybersecurity, mobility, or autonomous systems, DeepTech is increasingly becoming central to India’s economic growth story.
Experts say the real opportunity lies in building technologies that solve large-scale, real-world problems while strengthening India’s self-reliance and global competitiveness. From factories and warehouses to legal systems and aerospace labs, intelligent systems are beginning to influence how decisions are made, how operations are managed, and how infrastructure responds in real time.
Here’s what industry leaders had to say about India’s DeepTech decade and the technologies expected to define the next 10 years:
Sanjeev Bhandari, Founder and CEO of AirBrick Infra
“India’s DeepTech decade will not just be about creating new technologies, but about reimagining how our cities, workplaces, and business ecosystems function. Walk into any modern workplace today, and you will witness that offices are becoming more intelligent, and infrastructure is slowly evolving from static spaces into living ecosystems, and it is happening through data, automation, and real-time decision-making.
I believe that over the next ten years, AI, IoT, intelligent automation, and connected infrastructure systems will fundamentally transform the way businesses design and experience workplaces. These systems are already helping businesses achieve nearly 15-30% operational cost savings through energy optimization and predictive maintenance. India’s smart building and automation market itself is already valued at nearly USD 12–15 billion in 2026 and will expectantly grow at a double CAGR by 2030.
India has the opportunity to build infrastructure that is not just modern, but intelligent, scalable, and designed for the speed at which we as a country are growing.”
Shrinath Dakare, Co-Founder and CEO of OptiFlux
“India is no longer a global services hub; it is becoming the intelligence layer behind smarter industries, resilient supply chains, and data-driven operations. Across sectors such as manufacturing and logistics, businesses are facing increasing complexity every day: volatile demand, rising operational costs, resource constraints, and the pressure to improve efficiency at scale.
This is exactly why the next ten years will define India’s DeepTech decade. The technologies creating the biggest impact will not always be consumer-facing, but the systems quietly transforming industries behind the scenes through AI, operations research, industrial automation, and mathematical optimization. India’s AI-driven manufacturing market alone is expected to grow from nearly $300 million in 2024 to over $3.7 billion by 2030, reflecting how rapidly industries are embracing intelligent decision-making.
The real breakthrough here is in building foundational industrial intelligence that reduces waste, improves planning accuracy, optimizes production, and makes Indian industries globally competitive, efficient, and future-ready.”
Kamal Kishore Kumawat, Co-Founder & CTO, Edgistify
“India’s DeepTech decade won’t be decided in data centres. It will be decided where goods move, machines run, and infrastructure either holds or breaks.
From where we sit at Edgistify embedded in the operational layer of commerce, the shift is already visible. AI has stopped being a dashboard above the work. It is inside the work now, making decisions on inventory, routing, and fulfilment in real time, without waiting for someone to read a report.
Manufacturing is next, and the same pattern applies. Factories instrumented with IoT sensors and edge inference are catching failures before they surface and adjusting output without stopping the line. The physical system starts learning from itself.
Hardware closes the loop. As robotics costs fall and edge computing matures, the distance between a software decision and a physical action is shrinking to near-zero.
India has the engineering talent, the expanding manufacturing base, and digital infrastructure that took other economies decades to build. The pieces are here. What matters now is whether we build industrial systems with the same ambition we brought to consumer software.”
Ajit Venkatesh, Director, Globe Moving
“India’s DeepTech decade will be defined by technologies that solve real problems at national scale. The next 10 years will not be about chasing every new innovation, but about building strong technology foundations that improve productivity, strengthen resilience, and make India more self-reliant. For industries like logistics, DeepTech will transform how we plan, move, track, protect, and deliver. It will help companies anticipate disruption, optimise resources, reduce waste, improve safety, and give customers greater confidence through visibility and control. The biggest shift will be from reactive operations to intelligent, predictive, and accountable systems. India’s opportunity is not just to use advanced technology, but to create it, commercialise it, and apply it meaningfully across sectors. When innovation moves from laboratories to daily operations, it becomes a force multiplier for business, industry, and national progress. That is the true promise of India’s DeepTech decade.”
Akash, Founder and CEO, InsightAi
“India’s DeepTech decade will be shaped by technologies that solve large-scale, real-world problems like AI, cybersecurity, robotics, semiconductor innovation and intelligent financial infrastructure. What makes India interesting is the scale at which problems exist here, which forces companies to build practical and highly scalable solutions. Over the next 10 years, I believe India will move from being a technology services hub to becoming a serious product and innovation powerhouse in DeepTech.”
Nikhil, Co-founder, EzPedal
“India’s DeepTech decade will be shaped by startups using AI to solve real, on-ground challenges at massive scale. The biggest breakthroughs won’t stay confined to digital platforms—they will transform how cities move, deliver, build, and operate. From intelligent mobility and logistics to predictive infrastructure and climate tech, AI is becoming the operating layer for the physical world. The next ten years will belong to founders who combine deep technology with deep empathy for real-world problems.”
Vikas Sharma, Blackcoat.ai
“India’s technological moment is real. But momentum without purpose produces noise, not progress. The true measure of any technology is not the speed of its deployment, but the depth of its impact on the people it reaches.At Blackcoat.ai, we have built on a conviction that artificial intelligence must strengthen human judgment, not substitute it. Nowhere is this more consequential than in law, a domain where precision, trust, and accountability are not features, but foundations. When intelligent systems support legal professionals, the gains are not merely operational. They are institutional. Accuracy improves. Time has recovered. Access to justice, historically a privilege, edges closer to a right. India does not need technology that impresses. It needs technology that includes.”
Ankur Kanaglekar, Vice President – India, Thales
“On this National Technology Day, Thales celebrates India’s spirit of innovation and reaffirms our commitment to co-creating a future-ready, Aatmanirbhar Bharat. As a trusted partner in India’s growth for over 73 years, we continue to strengthen our Make in India, Innovate in India, and Export from India strategy – aligning our global expertise in defence, aerospace, cyber and digital technologies with the nation’s strategic priorities.
Through our engineering competence centres in Bengaluru and Noida, collaborations with the Indian industry and academia, we are driving cutting-edge advancements in complex avionics, cybersecurity, responsible biometrics and more, while nurturing a highly skilled workforce. The launch of Thales Research & Technology India earlier this year marks a significant step in expanding advanced research capabilities in real-time embedded software, edge computing, and embedded AI.
With growing local R&D, robust partnerships and an excellent talent pool of over 2400 employees in India, we remain dedicated to empowering Indian innovation, fostering indigenous development, and contributing to a secure, resilient, and self-reliant technological ecosystem for the future.”
Dr. Sunil Shekhawat, Co Founder and CEO of SanchiConnect
“I strongly believe DeepTech is rapidly evolving from an emerging sector into a strategic pillar of industrial and economic competitiveness, defining the next decade of innovation in India. The strongest advancements are visible across deeptech startups such as industrial AI, advanced manufacturing, robotics, spacetech, mobility, and defence systems, where startups are building proprietary technologies, core engineering IP, and globally relevant products capable of solving complex industrial and strategic challenges.
The scale of this shift is already visible. India now has around 4,200 DeepTech startups, while the sector is projected to become a $30 billion market by 2030. Advanced manufacturing alone is expected to contribute nearly $1.3 trillion to the economy by the end of the decade, reflecting the increasing depth of IP-led innovation and engineering-driven growth.
India has a bigger opportunity to become a global hub for engineering-led innovation, foundational technologies, and industrial R&D, building globally relevant IP and capabilities that shape the future of innovation and economic growth.”
Kulpreet Sahni, Founder and CEO, Chiltier
“As India accelerates toward a deeptech-driven future, the focus cannot remain limited to compute alone. The next decade of AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, and high-performance data systems will depend equally on the infrastructure that supports them efficiently and sustainably.
As computing power scales, thermal management can become one of the defining challenges of the technology ecosystem. Advanced processors and AI workloads generate immense heat densities, making efficient cooling systems critical for performance, reliability, and energy optimization. In many ways, the future of deeptech will also be shaped by how intelligently we manage energy and heat.
India has a significant opportunity to build future-ready infrastructure that supports this next wave of innovation. The conversation around technological leadership must include sustainability, efficiency, and resilient engineering from the ground up. Over the next ten years, the countries that succeed in deeptech will be those that invest not only in innovation at the chip level, but also in the systems that enable compute to scale responsibly.”
Lakshman Devarajan, Founder and CEO, Mad Monkey AI
“India’s next decade of digital experiences will be defined by one question: does the AI serve the user, or does the user serve the AI? Right now, most platforms use artificial intelligence to maximize screen time — feeding users algorithmically optimized content designed to keep them scrolling, not to help them build, earn, or grow. That model worked for advertisers. It failed the 40 million Indian college students spending 3-4 hours daily on platforms that give them nothing back.
The real opportunity for AI in India isn’t smarter content feeds — it’s outcome-driven platforms where every interaction produces tangible value. AI that helps a student in Coimbatore find a co-founder in 60 seconds. AI that reduces the friction between having an idea and building a team around it. AI that understands Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu natively, not as an afterthought. This is what contextual, localized AI looks like — and India’s mobile-first, multilingual reality demands it.
The next wave won’t be built by companies optimizing for engagement metrics. It will be built by those brave enough to optimize for outcomes — collaborations formed, skills exchanged, income earned, and screen time that users are genuinely proud of. India has the talent, the demographic, and the digital infrastructure to lead this shift globally. The question is whether we’ll replicate Silicon Valley’s attention economy or build something the world copies from us.”
Amit Relan, CEO and co-founder, mFilterIt
“India’s next decade will not be defined only by digital growth; it will be defined by digital resilience.
Artificial Intelligence is no longer just automating workflows; it is becoming the frontline defence against ad fraud, cybercrime, identity manipulation, and large-scale cyberattacks. As fraudsters evolve with AI-generated threats, India’s technology ecosystem has an opportunity to build smarter cybersecurity frameworks, predictive fraud intelligence, and defence technologies capable of securing both businesses and national infrastructure.
The future belongs to nations that can detect faster, defend smarter, and respond in real time. From securing digital advertising ecosystems to strengthening defence tech capabilities, India is entering a decade where DeepTech will shape economic confidence and cyber sovereignty alike.”
Amit Kumar, CTO & Director, Easebuzz
“India’s digital payments ecosystem is entering a new phase where intelligence, not just scale, will define the next decade. AI is rapidly transforming payments from being transactional systems into adaptive, predictive, and deeply contextual ecosystems. As payment volumes grow and user expectations evolve, AI will become central to delivering real-time fraud prevention, smarter risk assessment, personalized payment journeys, and seamless merchant operations. India’s strong digital public infrastructure, combined with rising AI adoption, positions the country to lead the next wave of fintech innovation globally. The focus now must be on building AI systems that are responsible, transparent, and inclusive, ensuring technology enhances accessibility for businesses and consumers alike.”
Dr. Nipun Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Degree Apprenticeship
“India’s DeepTech decade will not be defined by technology adoption alone, but by how quickly we can build a workforce that is ready to deploy these technologies at scale. What stands out in our data is the intensity of demand building across sunrise sectors such as EV and mobility, GCCs, and semiconductors, with Net Apprenticeship Outlook (NAO) as high as 79% in semiconductors and 75% in EVs. This reflects a clear shift from hiring for potential to hiring for immediate productivity.
The nature of entry-level jobs is being redefined. Roles are becoming more applied, interdisciplinary, and tightly linked to real-world execution. This means the gap is no longer about access to education, but about the speed at which talent can become productive.
The real opportunity for India lies in compressing this transition. Work-integrated learning, apprenticeships, and industry-led training models are emerging as the fastest way to do this. If India can align skilling with the pace of deeptech investments, it can convert this decade into a structural advantage, building not just capability, but global leadership in talent.”
Harishanker Kannan, CEO & Co-founder of Scalefusion
“Technology once had its value defined by how fast it could help companies function. Today, however, the value of technology lies in how comfortable companies feel scaling up thanks to it, especially in FinTech, banking, and enterprises. Complexity, whether we like it or not, has now become the price for innovation. More systems, more endpoints, more access layers, with each offering increased efficiency while also delivering fragmentation under the hood.
The leaders of tomorrow won’t necessarily be those who have the latest and greatest technologies, but rather those who are able to connect technology effortlessly. All together, to work as one.
On National Technology Day, we should remember that sometimes the best technology in the world is the one that remains invisible, yet keeps everything together.”
Conclusion
India’s DeepTech push is no longer limited to ambition or policy conversations. The transition is already underway across manufacturing floors, logistics networks, legal systems, defence ecosystems, smart infrastructure, and mobility platforms. As emerging technologies become deeply embedded into physical and industrial systems, the coming decade may well determine how India positions itself in the global technology order, not just as a consumer of innovation, but as a creator of it.
