The summit’s ‘Ideas to Impact: Start‑ups accelerating the energy transition’ session on September 23 brought together academics, industry leaders and entrepreneurs to map the current landscape of green start‑ups and identify the bottlenecks that prevent promising technologies from reaching market.
Indumathi M. Nambi of IIT Madras’ Department of Civil Engineering highlighted that few incubators engage students during the idea‑generation phase and many innovators never register with existing programmes, exposing a gap in the incubation ecosystem. She advocated for dedicated pre‑incubators to help students develop and test concepts, noting that while deep‑tech start‑ups generally secure funding, they often struggle to gain trust for novel ideas. Nambi also proposed a doctoral programme in entrepreneurship to provide mentorship and a pathway to commercialisation.
Pravin Dongre, Executive Director of Indian Oil Corporation Limited, outlined IOCL’s recent efforts to nurture the start‑up ecosystem, citing funding cycles of 18 to 36 months for ventures across the energy and water value chains. He pointed to commercialised outcomes such as eco‑toilets and nano‑fillers for oil pipelines, and stressed the importance of long‑term development clarity for start‑ups, arguing that robust incubation mechanisms benefit both innovators and established industries.
Karthika Gopi, founder and CEO of Carbelim, described the practical hurdles faced by deep‑tech start‑ups, including real‑world testing, intellectual‑property protection and scaling production. She called for consortium‑based support that gives patient investors the gestation time needed for breakthrough technologies, and urged start‑ups to seek international partnerships and generate early evidence to validate their solutions.
All speakers converged on the need for stronger collaboration among industry, academia and government, as well as the introduction of entrepreneurship as a school‑level subject to steer students toward sustainable career paths. They argued that such systemic changes could accelerate the deployment of clean‑energy and water technologies and help India meet its net‑zero ambitions.