In 2019, Ubisoft invited me to Paris. As I strolled through Station F, the sprawling startup campus that French billionaire Xavier Niel opened in 2017, I ran into a name I never expected to see nearly 8,000 km from home: Kerala Ventures. A venture capital firm, founded by French partners, named after the state I hail from.

Curious, I emailed them to ask why. The answer was disarmingly simple. The name was deliberate, they said, because they believed the next decade belonged to Kerala.

Seven years on, more than half of that decade is spent. So when Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner of Mumbai-headquartered IvyCap Ventures, took the stage on day two of Huddle Global 2026 in Kovalam with a keynote titled “Kerala’s Moment – From Talent to Scale”, the question hung in the salty air: has the bet paid off, or is Kerala still a promise?

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Gupta’s verdict is that the fundamentals are in place: a deep pool of talent working both inside the state and across the world, visible momentum among young founders, state-backed capital, and a growing roster of VC funds supported by the government. What is missing is the plumbing that carries a company from early traction to genuine scale.

That diagnosis lands at a convenient moment. A day earlier, Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan opened the eighth edition of Huddle with a scale-up mission that shifts the target from launching 10,000 startups to building more than 100 that each earn over INR 100 crore (about US$11 million) in annual revenue. Gupta, who runs one of India’s largest homegrown VC firms and invests through the alumni networks of the IITs and IIMs, effectively laid out what it would take to get there.

Here are the five lessons from his keynote.

1. The diaspora is an asset class Kerala has not built yet

Gupta’s most distinctive argument is about money that already flows into the state. According to the RBI’s latest remittances survey, Kerala received 19.7 per cent of India’s inward remittances in 2023-24, second only to Maharashtra. Almost all of it goes into family maintenance and savings.

His pitch is to channel a slice of that into a professionally managed endowment, a long-term corpus that pulls the ecosystem onto a single platform. The Gulf diaspora, he argued, brings more than cash; it brings networks and access to markets in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and beyond. Gupta knows the model: he set up India’s first endowment fund at IIT Delhi in 2019.

The caveat is obvious. Remittances are household income, not idle risk capital, and endowments live or die on governance and patience. Southeast Asia has learned the hard way that the weak link is often the LP base, not the VC model itself.

2. The real valley of death sits between years three and five

Across India, Gupta said, there is now some momentum at the earliest stages. The trouble begins between years three and five, where too many Kerala startups simply get lost. Funding is only part of it. He pointed to gaps in CSR and grant money, the struggle to land a first anchor customer, and a mismatch between the timelines of capital and technology.

Deeptech illustrates the problem. Investment in the space rose, dipped and is now recovering, but early-stage grants remain scarce and translation capital thin. As founders across the region have found, a deeptech company rarely has just one capital problem.

3. Patient, domestic institutional capital is strategic, not optional

The Indian VC market is crowded, yet capital remains scarce at specific stages, and Gupta expects that to persist. His remedy is domestic institutional money, from pension pools to the Centre’s INR 1 lakh crore (about US$11 billion) Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) scheme.

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He described RDI capital as money with a horizon of up to 20 years at very low interest, which has begun moving into a handful of funds and research-led pockets after a slow start. Strategic and corporate investors, he added, are also showing up earlier in the funding cycle. For founders, the message was blunt: learn how this capital works and go after it.

4. Build clusters around research, not just more incubators

The US and China, Gupta noted, built their innovation hubs around universities and research institutions. If India wants to win in AI, climate, food and health, it needs targeted hubs, and Kerala is positioned to host several. Japan is running a similar experiment, with Kyoto rather than Tokyo emerging as its real deeptech bet.

The mechanics matter more than the buildings. Gupta wants research-to-venture pipelines where academia, translation funding and hands-on support converge, because deep tech needs scale-up teams, not just scientists. Corporates have a role too: customer access, he said, is the biggest hurdle for most startups, echoing the argument that customers, not capital, are deeptech’s real bottleneck.

Southeast Asian readers will recognise the template in Singapore, where National GRIP shepherds deep tech ventures from lab to market. IvyCap’s own twist is to recycle part of its profits into endowments at institutions such as the IITs, putting money back into research.

5. AI has rewritten the cost of competing, so prove capital efficiency

AI, Gupta said, is changing not only how products are built but the cost of building them and the nature of competition. When it is cheap to build, it is cheap to copy, and investors want to see defensibility and a credible business model.

His sharpest note was on capital efficiency. Too many impact-driven companies, he argued, fail to show investors how their capital will actually be used. Hype will not close that gap; unit economics will.

A first cheque, and a founder’s homecoming

Gupta closed by handing the stage to Aparna, founder of NeuMe NeuroTech, which he described as the first investment from the endowment he has been championing. Her story was personal: a family member survived a stroke, and physical therapy got her walking again, but not back to herself. “The body survives, but the mind remains stranded,” Aparna said.

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She cited roughly 1.8 million stroke cases a year in India, with four in ten survivors struggling with memory, attention and other cognitive deficits that standard rehabilitation, which measures progress in physical milestones, largely misses. Her startup pairs multimodal brain-computer interface hardware with adaptive, game-like cognitive software designed to keep patients engaged rather than frustrated, and positions it as a tool for clinicians and neurologists, not a replacement. She launched it officially at Huddle, in her home state.

One cheque does not make an asset class, and the endowment’s size, governance and return expectations remain unanswered. But if diaspora money begins backing companies like this at scale, the French partners who named their fund after Kerala may yet be proved right. On their own clock, the state has a little over three years left to show it.

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