Ajay Jain and SilverX Fund: The ₹800 Crore Deep-Tech Fund
How a boy who learned credit before long division built one of India's most contrarian venture firms, and why his Silver X fund is skipping the SaaS bloodbath to bet on quantum, space, and vertical AI
Long before Ajay Jain wrote his first check into a space-tech startup, before seven years at Intel and 3,000 startup pitches at T-Hub, he was a small boy in his father’s money-lending shop. He had not started Grade 2. He was already learning the only finance lesson that matters: some people pay back, some do not, and paperwork has very little to do with the difference.
I didn’t go to school till Grade 2. I was sitting in my dukaan. That’s where my first business school happened.
Four decades later, Ajay is the co-founder and managing partner of Silverneedle Ventures, the Hyderabad firm whose second vehicle, SilverX, is raising ₹800 crore with a ₹400 crore greenshoe that could push assets to ₹1,200 crore. The mandate is narrow: deep tech, semiconductors, materials, space, and vertical AI. No consumer plays, no crypto, no gaming, no lending, despite the family history.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From dukan to deep tech
Most Indian VCs arrive through investment banking or a startup exit. Ajay arrived through neither. After the dukaan came an MS at the University of Arizona, then seven years at Intel doing pre-silicon chip verification, where he absorbed the math of the power law before he had a name for it.
Only one in ten chips actually saw the light of day.
Then came an ISB MBA and Gray Matters India, where Ajay raised $8 million from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation before the company was acquired by ConveGenius in 2020. At T-Hub, modeled on Paris’s Station F, he screened roughly 3,000 startups in two years. He once watched Travis Kalanick walk through and broker an Uber Eats Singapore order for a Hyderabad EV startup. A venture ecosystem, he realised, is not the cap table. It is the corridor.
In 2018, Ajay and six friends started Xseed Partners. Across roughly 30 investments, the breakout was Paymatrix, where Muthoot Pappachan acquired a 54 percent stake at roughly 7x the syndicate’s money. That deal gave him the credibility to institutionalize. Silverneedle was incorporated in 2022.
The Silver X bet
Fund I closed at ₹80 crore across 16 companies. By late 2024, follow-on capital had gone into a third of the portfolio, and the standouts were compounding fast.
OnFinance AI, a generative AI compliance platform serving BSE Ltd and Kotak, raised a $4.2 million Pre-Series A led by Peak XV’s Surge. Silverneedle’s position is marked up 5 to 8 times in eighteen months. BrainSight AI, a precision neuro-imaging startup pursuing US FDA certification, raised $5 million led by IAN Alpha Fund. Dhruva Space, entered sub-₹40 crore, has been greenlit by IN-SPACe for Ground Stations as a Service. SuperK secured a ₹100 crore follow-on after Silverneedle’s entry.
In India, the power law is not very apparent yet. But OnFinance is at 5 to 8x in eighteen months. SuperK has a ₹100 crore round around our investment. Dhruva is sitting very pretty.
Silver X is structurally different. Forty percent of the fund, roughly ₹320 crore, goes into initial checks. The remaining 60 percent is reserved for follow-on tranches of $4 to $5 million into the winners. The arithmetic is unforgiving: a single primary check that goes 50x can return the entire corpus.
I’m doing what I ask my founders to do, which is grow 10x. But I’m only doing 4 to 5x on first checks, then doubling down.
Silver X has signed an MoU with the Amaravati Quantum Valley to co-invest roughly ₹10 crore each in up to 10 quantum startups.
Why deep tech, why now
The data backs the pivot. Indian deep-tech startups raised $1.6 billion in 2024, a 78 percent jump year on year. By July 2025, $1.06 billion had flowed across 137 equity rounds. Deep tech’s share of total venture rounds has risen from 2.6 percent in 2016 to nearly 7 percent in 2023.
The state is catalyzing the shift. The Union government’s ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Scheme attracted 124 proposals worth ₹25,000 crore in its first three months. The ₹76,000 crore Semiconductor PLI is building the fabrication ecosystem. Space FDI now allows 100 percent automatic investment in satellite components, 74 percent in satellite operations, and 49 percent in launch vehicles. IIT Madras alone incubated 104 deep-tech startups in FY2024-25 and filed 417 patents, more than one a working day.
The founder’s playbook
Ajay’s diagnosis of why most pitches fail is the most useful part of any conversation with him.
The first sin is the top-down TAM slide. Founders walk in with a $50 billion global market estimate and expect the number to do the persuasion. It never does.
It’s not the best products that necessarily sell today. You need to know the best problem to solve. A great product needn’t sell. But if it is a problem that needs to be solved, that’s what people are willing to pay for.
The second is outsourcing the business plan.
If you cannot create your own business plan, that’s a problem. Do not let a CA create it for you. ChatGPT can build your deck. What I want to hear is your story, why you are really in this.
The third is treating cash flow as a Series B problem when it kills startups at Series A. The fourth is failing to articulate the next round; a founder pitching Silver X must explain why a $4 million follow-on will be justified eighteen months out.
The discipline extends to what Silver X will not touch. No crypto, no real-money gaming, no lending despite the family lineage, no consumer plays where Silverneedle cannot add value.
We will never play a game where we don’t add value.
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