Agra boy’s American dream: VC investor Amir Khan on bridging US-India deep tech corridor

So the transition from Lentech and finance-based entrepreneurship to focusing more on backing technology entrepreneurs.

I mean, I see you have a mix of folks who have done software, e-commerce, but also things like robotics and so on.

And especially at Marl, and I saw that it's an acronym for mobility, autonomy, robotics, logistics, robotics.

How did this sort of transition happen? I mean, give us a sense of or a glimpse into your thinking back then, some of the trends that you're seeing worldwide and how you thought you could sort of tap into that, influence those trends, all of that.

Oh, absolutely.

I think so back in the back in about 16, 15, 16, 2015, 16, I found a sentence like everyone was building software.

There was a race to build software and people wearing badges.

I think this was a Salesforce copyright thing.

So we may have to remove it or may not.

I don't know if that matters anymore.

Software is eating the world.

Those are those days.

And every VC was gung ho about software building, helping founders build software for a quick buck.

In those times, I really believe the long-term strategy of deep tech investment because it is not a piece of software that can improve a small societal by a small improvement, but deep tech with science and engineering actually has proven that it's given this industrial revolution, printing press, and even where we are today.

So I really wanted to be on the other side of deep tech, and I really wanted to really invest in that.

So that's kind of found... we found what was the technology coming at that point? That was 5G was right up and coming at that perspective.

And we looked at closely, what would the vertical 5G will have most impact on? And that is really where we come.

We came with like, it will impact mobility, autonomous cars, which is today is a reality because of 5G.

We thought about it by 15, 2015 and 17, that era.

We looked at robotics, which again, have proven themselves.

You can operate on a patient from Shenzhen, China into a deli.

And that's one like a few years ago was there.

Logistics, shipping containers, all the way moving from a shipping containers to today, a Blinkit can deliver you your order.

That is all because of 5G within eight minutes.

So again, and also I'm terrible at names.