How India’s building a strong base of deep tech ventures

When Sunil Gupta, Srinivasa Rao Aluri, Mark Mathias, and Anil Prabhakar set out to start a venture in quantum computing, they had little idea about quantum physics. Quantum was an emerging area, and India had almost no talent in the space. But Gupta and others believed quantum computing would one day become far more powerful than classical computing, and it would make it easy to hack into the present-day cryptography-based security systems.
So when they decided to develop quantum-safe security products, they first had to prove the science. That involved doing fundamental R&D, and translating that into a working technology. “There were no benchmarks. We had to do everything from scratch, identifying components, identifying the sources of the components. The first year was all experiments. We then managed to take it to a meaningful product, did the proof of tech,” recollects Gupta.
Then they needed to demonstrate proof of business – how to take it to customers who would be willing to pay for it. “It was such complex technology that it was difficult to explain to the customer. But there, the Nasscom DeepTech Club really helped. They helped us really articulate quantum tech in a common man’s language,” says Gupta. Today, their company, QNu Labs, has India’s defence sector and government units, as well as big banks in the US and Europe, among their customers.