Venture capital firm Chiratae Ventures has announced the first batch of its Sonic DeepTech program, committing up to $10 million in investments across selected startups working in frontier technologies. The announcement came after the program’s Demo Day held in Bengaluru on May 6.
The Sonic DeepTech initiative attracted thousands of applications from startups across India, reflecting growing momentum in the country’s deeptech ecosystem. After a competitive selection process, Chiratae Ventures picked five startups for investment support – Ctrl B, Interact AI, SuprSend, TakeMe2Space, and one stealth startup.
The program is focused on supporting founders building solutions in sectors such as applied AI and machine learning, space technology, robotics, quantum technologies, climate and energy, advanced manufacturing, bio and medtech, and the digital economy.
Speaking about the initiative, Sudhir Sethi, Founder of Chiratae Ventures, said India is currently in a strong position to build globally competitive deeptech companies due to its talent pool, research capabilities, and growing innovation ecosystem.
As part of the program, the selected startups will also gain access to resources from NVIDIA Inception, NVIDIA’s startup support platform designed for AI and deeptech companies. The collaboration will provide startups with access to AI developer tools, training programs, preferred pricing on NVIDIA hardware and software, partner offers, and opportunities to connect with global investors and ecosystem players.
Among the selected startups, TakeMe2Space is developing nanosatellite infrastructure for edge AI computing and Earth observation systems. CtrlB is building a serverless data lake platform aimed at reducing cloud observability and analytics costs through a diskless architecture.
Meanwhile, Interact AI is creating AI-powered avatars that can replace traditional chatbots with product-aware conversational agents trained in sales and marketing workflows. SuprSend has developed a multi-channel notification infrastructure platform that allows businesses to manage communications through a single API.
The final selected company remains in stealth mode and is building a vertical AI platform.
Chiratae Ventures said the Sonic DeepTech program was designed to help startups solving complex problems in sectors that have historically received limited early-stage funding support. The program offered up to $2 million in seed funding with decision timelines as short as 48 hours.
Apart from the funded startups, the firm also identified 14 “Sonic DeepTech Disrupters” – startups recognised for their strong potential across various deeptech sectors.
The venture capital firm plans to reopen applications for the Sonic DeepTech program later this year to support more emerging startups in the category.
-By Shivani Solanki
