Why climate tech founders face rough winds

Hindustan Times

24-05-2025

You can sense the fatigue in the room when climate tech founders in India talk about raising their next round. It's not just the familiar startup tension of chasing capital. It's the slower, more bruising disillusionment of people who built something difficult, often scientifically solid, and now find themselves stranded. Not because they failed to deliver, but because the ecosystem around them failed to catch up.
The numbers tell part of the story. Of the 2,600 climate tech startups founded in India over the past decade, only around 800 are still standing. That may sound like a disaster. But to someone like Mridula Ramesh, founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute, author and an investor who has invested in more than 30 entities (not all climate tech) over the last ten years says, that's actually a sign of surprising resilience. 'One fourth surviving is not necessarily a bad number,' she says. 'But most of them really find their footing only around year four or five. That's exactly when the money runs out.'
This is the valley of death that every climate startup in India must cross. It's a stretch of time between proving the science and proving the business. And the capital required is slow, expensive and scarce. Made scarcer by signals currently emanating from the developed world. But it's not just about patient capital. The deeper issue, Ramesh argues, is investor mindset. Some investors entering this space don't fully appreciate the science or time required to scale. Climate tech is not like AI-ML, which can mean they fund less-impactful but scalable ideas, distorting entire industries.
Ashwin Kak, a partner at the Intellecap, has seen all this up close too. He's spent years advising startups and corporates on climate strategy. He writes on LinkedIn that what troubles him is not just the absence of capital, but the presence of self-deception. 'Many of these startups live in echo chambers. They talk only to other climate founders, apply for the same grants, get the same awards. But they don't talk to customers. They don't ask: Will someone actually pay for this?'
That's not a rhetorical question. Because in Indian climate tech, even market validation is tricky.
One of the most frustrating examples Ramesh points to is a startup that helps sugarcane farmers improve their yield by 30 percent while saving 75 percent of their water. But because water isn't priced properly in India, they can't sell it as a water-saving tool. They have to market it as a yield enhancer or a labour-saving device instead. 'It's absurd,' she says. 'We're depleting groundwater across the country, and we can't monetise saving it.'
This is what economists call a market failure. But in the real world, it means well-engineered solutions can't scale because no one will pay for the thing they actually fix.
The same distortion exists in waste management. Ramesh's institute found that just by managing and segregating waste properly, India could generate one to two million new jobs. But unless people are willing to pay for the collection and sorting of that waste, there's no business case to train workers or invest in systems. Cities like Indore have shown what's possible but they're outliers.
Policy can fix this, but it won't be easy. 'Pricing water would be a great start,' Ramesh says. 'Just one Mumbai has the population of four Singapore's. Think of the innovation that pricing water in just one city could unlock.' But the public appetite for such pricing reform is weak. In a survey conducted by her team, hardly anyone said they'd vote for a candidate who promised to manage water – and many of them were getting water just once every four days.
The ecosystem's immaturity doesn't stop at policy. It shows up in the teams building these companies. Kak points to a common trap: loyalty to the founding team. 'The skills needed to build a prototype are not the same ones needed to scale a company,' he says. But many startups avoid hard conversations. They keep early hires in key roles long after their relevance has expired. And the organisation stalls.
Sometimes the problem is the opposite—too much change, too fast. Kak recalls companies pivot so often they forget what they set out to solve. 'A year in, even their advisors can't explain what they do anymore. That's when the team falls apart. Then there are the branding games, he goes on to explain. This includes vanity advisory boards and overhyped impact claims,' he says.
Still, there are reasons for hope. The volume of startups entering the space has grown dramatically. 'A decade ago, I'd see one new climate startup a month,' Ramesh says. 'Now it's six or seven a week.' Not all are young. Some lack the business-sense. But they're not lacking in courage.
What they need now is an ecosystem that doesn't penalise them for the hard path they've chosen. This means investors willing to learn the science. Advisors who challenge assumptions, not just add names to decks. Customers who value what's being built. And above all, public systems that price the future properly. Because if we continue expecting climate tech to behave like software, we'll keep losing our best ideas in the valley. And in the process, we'll lose time we don't have.