By Raj Sethia, Managing Partner, MGF Kavachh

India is entering a fundamentally new technological era.

Having spent years in sectors shaped by dependence on imported technologies, from telecom to Digital infrastructure and engaging with a large number of businesses built and re-built around them, I have seen first-hand how external reliance can eventually limit a nation's long-term growth and strategic flexibility.

Reflecting on my lived experience, telecom is perhaps the clearest reminder of why this matters. For years, India's networks have been built largely on equipment and software from a small set of foreign vendors, first Western suppliers such as Ericsson and Nokia, U.S. and later Chinese players such as Huawei and ZTE. That concentration created real vulnerabilities for the sector. Operators get locked into proprietary systems, dependent on external upgrade cycles, spare parts, and vendor roadmaps, which raised costs, slowed transitions, and reduced strategic flexibility. More importantly, when a country's telecom backbone rests on infrastructure designed and controlled elsewhere, the risk is not just commercial; it is sovereign. Networks that carry financial transactions, government communications, military-adjacent data flows, and everyday citizen activity can become exposed to geopolitical pressure, supply disruptions, or in the worst case, potentially rogue actors operating through compromised or untrusted infrastructure.

This line of thought and conclusion can be extended to multiple critical industries and applications and this is not an India problem alone. The majority of the nations in the world are between the rock and a hard place. But the good news is India is one of the few nations blessed with the size, economic heft, institutional foundations, policy support and most importantly the talent pool to do something about it. And doing it is!

Over the last few years, I have increasingly found myself speaking with founders building technologies that India would almost certainly have imported a decade ago. That shift, more than any headline or policy announcement, convinces me that India is at the beginning of a major transformation.

One statistic captures this particularly well. In FY14, India exported defence products worth ₹686 crore. By FY26, that number had reached a record ₹38,424 crore, a roughly 56-fold increase in just over a decade. India now exports defence equipment to more than 80 countries, including the United States, France, and Armenia.

This is far more than another feel-good export story. It reflects a deeper shift in India's identity - from being largely a consumer of strategic technology to becoming an emerging creator of it.

Yet many global investors still evaluate Indian strategic technology through an old outsourcing-era lens, assuming India's role will remain limited to cost efficiency or engineering support. On the ground, however, founders are already building proprietary systems across electro-optics, secure communications, space infrastructure, marine robotics, and photonics.

At MGF Kavachh, we are proud to support companies building in exactly these areas. GalaxEye has now taken its multisensor approach from development to orbit with Mission Drishti, launched in May 2026 as the world's first OptoSAR imaging satellite, combining optical imaging and synthetic aperture radar on a single platform. Velmenni is building secure wireless communication systems using light as the medium, including LiFi and light-communication solutions for environments where RF connectivity can be unsuitable or vulnerable to interference. Coratia Technologies has secured a ₹66 crore Indian Navy contract for indigenous underwater robotic systems, marking a significant step from technology development towards deployment. EON Space Labs has secured an Indian patent for its MIRA miniaturised space imaging system, with the 502-gram payload subsequently reaching orbit aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission in October 2026. InspeCity is building a vertically integrated technology stack spanning rendezvous, proximity operations and docking, green propulsion and robotics to extend satellite life and support more sustainable space operations; in August 2026, the company also raised ₹100 crore in Pre-Series A funding. And there is more I can talk about not just from our portfolio but from the wider eco-system of some amazing companies that have emerged over the past few years.

What has changed is not only policy support. It is ambition.

For decades, the assumption across many industries was simple: the most advanced technologies would always come from abroad. India would scale them, distribute them, or service them, but rarely build them.

That assumption is now changing in real time.

On 18 July 2026, Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 reached orbit from Sriharikota on its maiden flight, making India only the third country in the world with private orbital launch capability. A rocket designed, built and flown by an Indian private company would have been hard to imagine a decade ago.

The same month, calibrated science data from NISAR, the satellite ISRO and NASA jointly engineered and launched in 2025, began reaching researchers worldwide. India was not merely a launch partner. She was a co-developer.

Capital and intellectual property are starting to follow. The Government of India's ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund has taken a significant step forward with the announcement of its first cohort of 19 Second-Level Fund Managers on 12 October 2026, with a total commitment of ₹7,131 crore. This is an important step in translating the government's vision into action. Through the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), the initiative is building a framework to channel long-term capital into deep-tech and strategic technologies, while encouraging private investment to support innovation beyond the research stage and towards commercial deployment.

Patent filings by Indian residents rose from 24,326 in FY21 to 99,721 in FY26, roughly a fourfold increase in five years, helping make India the world’s sixth-largest patent filer.

Building sovereign capability requires not only capital, but also ecosystems that can accelerate innovation, partnerships, and deployment at scale. It needs new age investors to have a deep-rooted Foundry or an Accelerator mindset. More importantly, it needs Limited Partners who share and back this ethos. We have been fortunate on both fronts.

But beyond the numbers, the most important shift is psychological. Increasingly, Indian founders believe they can build frontier technologies from India, not just for India, but for the world.

The strategic logic behind this moment is equally important.

For nearly three decades, globalisation encouraged nations to source the best available technologies at the lowest possible cost, regardless of origin. That model depended on stable geopolitics and frictionless supply chains.

Today, that assumption no longer holds.

Export controls, embargos and restrictions, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical fragmentation are forcing countries to rethink which technologies they must own rather than simply access.

India is making that transition in real time, backed by stronger policy momentum, institutional alignment, and private-sector ambition than ever before.

This creates a significant opportunity for Indian companies capable of operating at global strategic standards.

One of the biggest opportunities in this sector comes from the nature of the technologies themselves

Strategic technologies are difficult to build, validate, and deploy. They require deep technical expertise, regulatory approvals, testing cycles, and real-world operational credibility. But that complexity also creates a strong competitive advantage.

Unlike sectors where products can be copied quickly, companies building in sectors like defence and aerospace, newspace critical communications, often develop deep intellectual property, high entry barriers, and long-term institutional relationships from the developmental stage itself. Once proven, these businesses can create durable market positions with significant long-term value.

This is why strategic technology has the potential to generate outsized outcomes for investors who understand the category well and are able to provide the rocket fuel required to accelerate, hit the milestones on or ahead of time and make their capital pool last longer.

India's R&D expenditure has also grown meaningfully in recent years. According to the latest DST data, gross expenditure on R&D reached ₹2.45 lakh crore in FY24, equivalent to 0.84% of GDP, with the private sector accounting for 51.8% of total R&D expenditure. The opportunity therefore remains significant, particularly in strategic technologies where the RDI Scheme is designed to help bridge the financing gap between research and commercialisation.

For India, sovereign technology is no longer only about reducing imports. It is about building long-term strategic resilience, creating globally competitive intellectual property, and ensuring that critical technologies shaping the future are increasingly designed and developed within the country.

Every indigenous capability built in India strengthens supply-chain security, reduces strategic dependence, and increases the country's ability to contribute meaningfully to the global technology ecosystem.

For us, this translates to a Stronger India and a Safer World.

What excites me most today is that Indian companies are no longer operating only at the level of experimentation or prototypes. We are now seeing real deployment across space systems, advanced communications, marine technologies, and strategic electronics.

For the first time in decades, India is not merely participating in global technology shifts. It is beginning to shape them.

The opportunity is real. And the window to build enduring leadership in this space is open now. At MGF-Kavachh, we feel blessed to be a part of it.

Stronger India. Safer World.

Raj Sethia

Managing Partner, MGF Kavachh