The Patient Capital Architect: How Vishesh Rajaram and Speciale Invest Built India’s Deep Tech Unicorns
From pharmaceutical heir to India’s most contrarian deep tech investor, backing rockets, robots, and a manufacturing renaissance
On May 30, 2024, at 7:15 AM, a rocket lifted off from Sriharikota carrying the culmination of eight years of patient capital. Agnikul Cosmos’s Agnibaan SOrTeD rocket became the world’s first launch vehicle powered by a single-piece 3D-printed engine, validating what many considered an impossible bet. For Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner of Speciale Invest, the 85-second flight represented more than technical achievement. It was the mathematical result of a contrarian investment philosophy forged from personal tragedy and refined over 17 years in venture capital.
The numbers tell a compelling story: Agnikul has raised $45.5 million and now carries a valuation of ₹6,230 crore. Speciale Invest, which Vishesh co-founded in 2016, has deployed capital across 52 companies, generating one unicorn, six acquisitions, and two soonicorns. The fund reviews approximately 2,000 companies annually to make just 4-5 investments, maintaining a conversion rate of less than 1%.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From Personal Loss to Patient Capital
Vishesh’s path to venture capital began with profound personal loss. At 22, while pursuing his MBA at Indian School of Business, his father died of cancer. The death derailed carefully laid plans to join the family’s pharmaceutical manufacturing business after gaining finance expertise through chartered accountancy and banking experience.
“I was a 22-year-old who inherited a business not knowing how to grow it. That was a tough situation to be in. I think life was very kind and the world was very kind. I was able to resolve the personal situation. And quite honestly, at that point of time, this was year 2007, I had pretty low risk appetite. I said, I just want a job.”
After successfully selling the API manufacturing company, Vishesh sought stability in employment. Ironically, the only job offer came from VenturEast, a venture capital fund. The man fleeing risk had landed in one of the riskiest asset classes in finance.
VenturEast provided a decade-long education in what Vishesh calls “the art of investing, the art of portfolio management, exit engineering and fundraising.” Joining in 2007 meant experiencing venture capital in India’s pre-smartphone, pre-cloud era, when founders were typically 10-15 year industry veterans raising growth capital rather than college students pitching pre-product ideas.
By 2016, after 10 years at VenturEast, Vishesh had developed a clear investment thesis: early-stage investing in category-creating companies aligned perfectly with his own zero-to-one experience. He wanted to work with founders building products that didn’t exist, solving problems through deep domain expertise that was “hard to learn, hard to achieve, hard to build.”
Building Speciale: The Mathematics of Discipline
Vishesh co-founded Speciale Invest with Arjun Rao, a classmate from his MBA days and friend of 17 years. Their approach was deliberately ground-up. The regulatory minimum to operate a venture capital fund in India is ₹20 crore. That became their initial goal. Fund I eventually closed at ₹61 crore, raised entirely from “family and friends and friends of family and friends.”
The portfolio construction followed strict mathematical principles: 16-20 companies invested over four years, with 50% of capital reserved for follow-on rounds. The discipline came from a fundamental belief about early-stage investing.
“You want to try and do that three or four times in a fund for it to be meaningful. The basic assumption you’re making is everybody has the potential to do well. Otherwise, you’re not investing. So the other part is that they all will need money subsequently to grow.”
This patient capital approach required identifying founders who could withstand the inevitable pain of entrepreneurship. Vishesh looks for three core attributes: ability to articulate vision clearly, capacity to build organizations, and resilience to handle rejection and failure.
Fund II, raised in 2021, brought ₹300 crore in capital. The firm maintains strict stage discipline, focusing on pre-seed and seed investments even when presented with excellent opportunities at later stages.
The Rocket Scientist’s Gambit
When Srinath Ravichandran approached Speciale in 2017, his background seemed unlikely for aerospace. He was an investment banker on Wall Street who quit everything to pursue a master’s in aerospace engineering.
“Clearly it sort of reflects on just the level of passion and motivation to be able to drop everything you’ve done for the first 25 years of your life to go rediscover something and come back.”
But Srinath and his co-founders brought a differentiated technical approach. Traditional rocket manufacturing uses subtractive methods, assembling rockets from multiple welded pieces. A small rocket might contain 100 welds, requiring 16+ weeks of high-precision engineering work.
“They said we’ll build small vehicles, ISRO builds large vehicles. So we’re very complementary. We don’t overlap with them at all. The second piece we said was one of the biggest problems in rockets is it’s so intricate. There’s about a lot of 100 welds in a small rocket but it takes time. It’s a high precision engineering job and historically it’s always been thought about being done using subtractive manufacturing. We said this is a classic case if you want something high precision you build it ground up, which is you build it using additive manufacturing or 3D printing.”
This approach allowed Agnikul to build rocket engines in 72 hours compared to the industry standard of 16+ weeks. Vishesh recognized this as a competitive advantage that would persist for years, creating the non-linear returns he seeks.
The validation came after four failed launch attempts. On May 30, 2024, Agnikul successfully launched from India’s first private launchpad. The company now plans commercial launches beginning in 2025. The timing proves fortuitous: the Indian government announced a ₹1,000 crore venture capital fund for space technology in Budget 2024, part of plans to expand the country’s space economy fivefold to $44 billion by 2033.
The Exponential vs Incremental Framework
Vishesh’s portfolio extends beyond space technology. Ultraviolette Automotive, which manufactures high-performance electric motorcycles, demonstrates his core investment philosophy.
“Internally we call that exponential over incremental. Doing something that’s already there and doing that better I would call incremental, but doing something that just doesn’t exist, I would call that exponential.”
Founders Narayan Subramaniam and Neeraj Rajmohan recognized that electric vehicles before 2016 were “poor looking vehicles with poor performance that customers were expected to buy to save the world.” They took a different approach: build aesthetically excellent products that deliver superior performance, making ownership desirable rather than sacrificial.
Their entry strategy mirrored Tesla’s playbook. Start with a premium product to establish brand perception, then expand to mass market segments. The F77 motorcycle launched in 2022 with a 10.3 kWh battery pack, 323 km range, and became the fastest electric two-wheeler manufactured in India.
Ultraviolette has raised $104 million and achieved a valuation of ₹2,780 crore. The company launched in European markets at EICMA 2024, pricing the F77 at EUR 9,999. When asked if he sees Ultraviolette as India’s two-wheeler Tesla, Vishesh’s response is unequivocal: “I think so. I think that’s the right analogy and that’s the right strategy to adopt for India.”
The Learning Machine
Vishesh attributes much of Speciale’s success to “learning in a very unbiased manner,” which involves synthesizing insights across the portfolio to identify new investment opportunities.
The Eternal Energy investment illustrates this cross-portfolio learning. After working with Ultraviolette, Vishesh understood the critical importance of thermal management in lithium-ion batteries. When Eternal Energy approached Speciale with technology for lithium cells that don’t generate heat, the prior context made the opportunity immediately recognizable.
“You have to learn. A lot of our companies we invest actually come from learnings from some of our other companies. Like we’ve invested in a company called Eternal Energy. They make lithium cells that don’t generate heat. Now, why does one have to care about heat and lithium cells? You know that once you’ve worked with a company that uses lithium cells in a two-wheeler.”
This learning requires humility. Vishesh insists on entering founder conversations assuming the founder knows more about their domain than he does.
“You have to go into that conversation saying, no matter what I have to teach the other person, I’m here to learn. I have to listen more than I can speak and see what I can pick up from it. Hopefully the founder knows more about something than I do. Otherwise I made a bad decision.”
Speciale’s flat organizational structure supports this model. The team of 12 investment professionals all source deals and manage portfolio companies, ensuring broad exposure to market trends and founder insights.
The Vindication Moment
Vishesh’s contrarian bets on deep tech are receiving unprecedented validation. Deep tech funding in India surged 78% in 2024, reaching $324 million across 35 deals. The government announced a ₹1,000 crore space fund and a broader ₹10,000 crore Fund of Funds scheme targeting deep tech startups.
Perhaps most significantly, eight major venture capital firms including Accel, Blume Ventures, Celesta Capital, and Premji Invest formed the India Deep Tech Investment Alliance in September 2024, committing over $1 billion to the sector over the next decade.
When asked about role models, Vishesh points to Vinod Khosla, whose firm has consistently backed seemingly impossible technologies.
“Vinod Khosla is definitely a strong living example of having built an organization with such values. And it’s again very first principles. I’ve heard him on multiple occasions say that the 5% chance of something working that can change humanity far outweighs 95% chance of that not working.”
This philosophy guides every investment decision at Speciale. The firm deliberately seeks risks with non-linear rewards, accepting higher failure probabilities in exchange for the potential to build category-creating companies. The approach has produced tangible results: beyond Agnikul and Ultraviolette, the 52-company portfolio includes Saiera in industrial robotics, Rocket Lane in customer onboarding software, and Mindgrove Technologies in semiconductor design.
Fund III, planned for launch within quarters, will maintain the same patient capital approach and comparable fund size. The strategy continuity reflects Vishesh’s belief that deep tech investing requires discipline across market cycles, holding periods of 10-15 years, and the conviction to hold winners rather than exit prematurely.
For founders considering deep tech ventures, Vishesh offers clear-eyed advice: “The cliche is don’t take external money unless you need it. Customer financing is the best way to finance if they’re able to pay you and that’s going to solve problems. If you need the money, then go talk to VCs.”
As India’s space economy targets fivefold growth and deep tech funding accelerates, Vishesh’s patient capital philosophy offers a template for building category-creating companies. The mathematics are straightforward: see thousands of opportunities, invest in the handful with potential for non-linear impact, support them through inevitable challenges, and hold winners for the long term.
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