Introduction

In a conversation with The Indian Startup Times, Debansh Sahoo, Analyst at Ankur Capital, shared a sharp, commercial oriented perspective on where early-stage capital can create meaningful enterprise value & returns for investors in India’s climate and core sectors. With cross-market experience and a clear thesis-first approach, Sahoo emphasized the importance of execution depth, sector timing, and a disciplined view on capital deployment in under-capitalized but economically vital markets.

Grounded Thinking, Global Exposure

Having lived and worked across Australia, the U.S., and India, Sahoo brings a globally informed lens to venture, but is quick to anchor decisions in operating realism. “Understanding the operating context is non-negotiable,” he stated. “Whether it’s grid tech in Tier 2 power corridors or structured agri trade in Maharashtra, market dynamics dictate product design and capital cycles.” At Ankur Capital, he underwrites businesses with a mindset that involves looking for signals that suggest durability and defensibility in low-trust, high-friction markets. “You can’t underwrite risk without clarity on execution and monetization pathways,” he added. “Narratives don’t convert to returns, operating signals do.”

Where the Market Is Undercapitalized and Commercially Viable

While India’s climate sectors have seen a rise in founder and investor interest, Sahoo believes that capital is still concentrated in a few visible corners, leaving significant white space across other high-friction, economically critical domains. “We’re focused on where structural inefficiencies meet commercial readiness,” he explained. “The capital gaps are not always in awareness, they’re in conviction to back execution-heavy models that don’t scale on software alone.”

At Ankur Capital, this has translated into an investment thesis around five key pillars:

1) Agri-supply chain transformation: beyond farm-level digitization, the opportunity lies in structured B2B trade systems where price discovery, quality enforcement, and logistics coordination are still largely offline.

2) Energy storage and grid flexibility: India’s push toward 500GW of renewables cannot materialize without long-duration storage, grid orchestration tools, and distributed energy platforms that can monetize load variability.

3) Industrial decarbonization: sectors like cement, steel, and materials remain hard-to-abate and underfunded. Opportunities lie in process innovation, alternate feedstocks, and interventions with a favorable cost-of-abatement profile.

4) Carbon & climate infrastructure: as MRV (Measurement, Reporting, and Verification) becomes core to monetizing emissions, vertical platforms that bring traceability, registries, and satellite/aerial intelligence to asset-heavy sectors will become infrastructure.

5) Climate-aligned mobility systems: beyond OEMs, whitespace exists in enabling layers; fleet electrification, battery lifecycle intelligence, residual value modeling, and EV-centric fintech for asset underwriting.

“These sectors aren’t just policy-relevant, they’re commercially large, operationally broken, and ready for infrastructure-grade businesses to be built,” Sahoo said.

Benchmarking Scale

The Vegrow Case Study: Sahoo points to Vegrow (an Ankur portfolio company) as a reference case. The company has built a demand-led digital platform for fruits, reducing food loss in supply chains to under 5%, far outperforming the ~30% industry average. By streamlining procurement, enforcing grading standards, and digitizing supply-demand signals, Vegrow has improved both inventory velocity and pricing outcomes across the value chain. “They’ve proven that structured trade can scale in fragmented networks. Their execution clarity is what stood out; logistics, quality control, routing—each layer built to compound throughput,” he said.

Energy Storage as an Economic Enabler

On the energy front, Sahoo detailed one of Ankur’s most recent investments out of Fund III: Vimano, which is building ion-conductive membranes for long-duration flow batteries and hydrogen value chains. “Storage isn’t a side problem; it’s the key unlock to realizing India’s 500GW renewable ambition,” he stated. India is projected to need over 300 GWh of battery storage by 2030. Traditional lithium-ion solutions are cost-intensive, high-maintenance, and misaligned with grid asset lifecycles. Vimano’s membranes enable higher energy efficiency, longer life, and significantly lower crossover, addressing core techno-economic constraints in both batteries and electrolyzers. “They’re solving the bottleneck that grid-scale renewables are bottlenecked by. This is where deeptech becomes commercially central.”

Capital Gaps, Not Market Gaps

Sahoo is clear that many sectors; especially industrial decarbonization, distributed grid orchestration, and carbon measurement infrastructure, might have longer investment horizons. But that doesn’t mean they lack venture-scale outcomes. “These aren’t hard problems, they’re underwritten problems. You have to talk to regulators, customers, and suppliers to triangulate whether a market’s ready for velocity,” he noted. “We don’t chase the hype, we trace out pain points and validate if the market will provide commercial returns in the timeline we seek in solving them.”

Advice to Emerging VCs and Founders

To aspiring investors entering early-stage VC, Sahoo advises: “Learn to assess traction without relying on generic information that is available. It’s in operating rhythm, gross margin unlocks, and repeatable demand.” For founders, the message is sharper: “Build systems that convert operational effort into commercial outcomes. That’s the compounding engine. Everything else is noise.”

Closing

Debansh Sahoo’s investment philosophy is grounded in market depth, execution clarity, and sector timing. At Ankur Capital, he leads investments across climate and future-of-work critical sectors where capital isn’t just filling gaps, it’s underwriting businesses that can scale into infrastructure-grade companies. His approach is simple: solve real problems with real operating models, and commercial returns follow.

-Interview conducted by Sandhya Bharti, Deputy Editor at Indian Startup Times