Saket Saurabh

From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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Here is a framework for nations to work with revolutions such as #AI and #Quantum. First you have your people learn, then dabble and become early/late adopters (hopefully not laggards!), then become effective technical users and finally value creators. It is only then that the economy benefits from your investment, and you create sustainable job growth. While #India is a key market for #Quantum with millions thirsting to learn and actually do things with this technology, there are still large gaps between: 1. Where Quantum Computing is today Vs where it needs to be for mass adoption [Quantum Sensing on the other hand is ready for prime time and GPS compromising incidents are only increasing] 2. The specialist work being done Vs the ability to hire millions of generalists 3. What it costs to tap into the technology Vs perception of what it should cost as a commodity 4. The talent it takes to produce world class indigenous technology Vs the talent that actually exists on the ground 5... Each of these gaps will close over time. In the lead-up and as a first step, India first needs to learn enough about this technology, ideally from the very best, and spread awareness. The starting point of this journey should ideally not be from dull videos or low quality social media content, but from hands-on practical learning that is delivered through high quality polished content. Such practical training effectively complements all the theoretical content you learn in universities. Q-CTRL's Black Opal product is the world's leading interactive learning tool that gives you just enough fundamentals (think 101) required to program a quantum computer. With over 28,000 users worldwide and success across the UK (Tamil Nadu adopted it last year as part of the naanmudhalvan program). And now, we have expanded our presence in India through a network of local resellers. We encourage Indian companies, governments and universities to work with us either directly or through our contacts. https://lnkd.in/gjJWHYB3 We also look forward to aligning with AICTE standards and to make our content even more relevant to India. Waseem Shiraz, Shobhit Gupta, Nagendra Nagaraja, Reena Dayal, Anil Prabhakar, Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Ajai Chowdhry, Harshan Budke, Sunil Gupta, Arindam Ghosh, Ravi Puvvala Dr M Jayaprakasan, ISDS., National Skill Development Corporation, MindTech, Kquanta Research, RV College Of Engineering, Sanjay Chittore, Uttkrist Innovations Private Limited, Subu Gupta, AICTE QRDLab - Quantum Computing in India, IBM DRDO, Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India, Ashutosh Sharma, Urbasi Sinha, Bloq Quantum LTIMindtree, Tata Consultancy Services Abhay Karandikar, NPTEL, National Quantum Mission, Eltech, Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Academy ITE and C Department Government of AP, Jayesh Ranjan, CDAC Bangalore, Kaushalya The skill University

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Trying something new this week - a studio industry roundup with my take on what matters. The studio model is no longer an experiment being run in a handful of places. It is infrastructure being built across geographies, sectors, and institutional types. 5️⃣ stories from the past seven days:  1️⃣ OSS Ventures hit a EUR 40M first close on a EUR 75M follow-on fund -- capital raised specifically to back the 30 companies their studio created since 2019. The "build then fund" lifecycle is maturing. B'More Venture Studio with a similar thesis: studio operations first, then dedicated capital to scale what's working.  2️⃣ Delta40 raised $20M from 54 investors across 13 countries to launch Africa's first integrated venture studio and fund. The LP base is almost entirely DFIs and foundations. Impact capital is discovering the studio model as a deployment vehicle, something I seeing across geographies (conversations with Michael Bob Starr and Damias McDonald this week alone) 3️⃣ Start Holdings launched Start.vc out of NYC and Barcelona after a $200M EV infrastructure exit. Another operator-turned-studio-founder. This is the pattern we see quite often in our work at 9point8 -- experienced operators like Jason Goldsmith who've built and exited deciding the studio model is how they want to build next.  4️⃣ UBC HATCH admitted 10 new deep-tech spinouts for Winter 2026 -- mostly climate tech. University venture builders are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Follow Evan Allen and Jaimie Testai to keep track of its rapid evolution.  5️⃣ The INVEST Act is advancing through the Senate. If passed, it expands qualifying VC fund size from $10M to $50M and loosens general solicitation rules for accelerator and university events. For studio-funds -- and for folks in the The Venture Studio Forum community tracking policy -- this could be the most significant capital formation legislation since the JOBS Act. If this roundup format is useful, I'll keep it going. What other noteworthy news hit your desk this week, and what stood out to you?

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This article, co-authored by Vardaan Ahluwalia and me lays out India's significant new Research Development and Innovation Fund initiative in the context of other successful interventions: when governments and the private sector work together, they can make a transformative difference to deep technology entrepreneurship. Equally, initiatives to help manage financial risk should be followed by structural reforms in areas ranging from intellectual property regulation, ease of clearances for start-ups, tax rationalization in capital gains and options that helps start-ups attract talent, and a visa regime that attracts leading global researchers. https://lnkd.in/gk92YSZa

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Emergent just raised $70M from SoftBank + Khosla — less than four months after its last round — and is now at $50M ARR, 5M users, and live in 190+ countries… What’s most interesting to me isn’t just the speed or the valuation pop. It’s who is using it. Non-technical founders. Small business owners. Even seniors. All “vibe-coding” real products into existence without engineering teams. This is what it looks like when AI raises the floor AND lowers the ceiling. Proud that VSC gets to help take this story to the mainstream. 🚀

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What a joy to speak with this brilliant cohort of innovators in the The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) ENTICE (Energy Transitions Innovation Challenge) 2.0 program and taking on their sharp questions at the investor bootcamp. 80% of global GHG emission reduction goals for 2050 can be met through energy system decarbonization, efficiency and electrification. This represents a US $100 trillion opportunity according to the IEA.     A stronger, more stable grid is at the heart of building a #resilient #energy future. This year’s program challenges innovators to tackle:  1) Behind-the-meter digital twins: #AI tools to analyse consumption and create appliance-level insights  2) Industrial flexibility at scale: AI solutions using smart meter data to identify flexible assets and operational inefficiencies    Kudos to the entrepreneurs and the GEAPP team for curating and executing such a thoughtful program.     Looking forward to seeing how these #innovations scale #impact.  Synapses Dalberg Media Vaishali (Vish) Mishra Anukul Tripathi (He/Him) Jayant Sinha Saurabh Kumar

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We at SIERRA Ventures are thrilled to lead the $8M Seed round in smallest.ai! We feel honored to partner with Sudarshan Kamath and Akshat Mandloi as they build an important company in the Voice AI space. We’ve now entered a new era. Voice AI agents are no longer research projects or demos - they’re deployed in production. Whether it’s buying or selling a house, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, or returning a purchase, there’s a growing chance you’ve already interacted with an AI voice agent without realizing it. Why Smallest AI: 💡 Team: Sudarshan and Akshat are customer-obsessed technical founders who understand what enterprises truly need.. agents that are fast, secure, and production-ready. 💡 Industry leading performance: The company has some of the fastest, highest-quality voice AI models in the world (Lightning Text to Speech) that outperform Elevenlabs, Cartesia across all parameters. Their SLM Electron outperforms GPT 4.1 Mini in both quality and latency for real-time conversational use cases. 💡 Integrated Voice stack:  Delivering a natural voice interaction requires a complex workflow under the hood integrating components like ASR, models, TTS. By optimizing every step in the loop, from low-latency TTS to contextually coherent responses, they are helping to deliver real-time, human-like conversational AI that sets a new benchmark for performance. 💡 Small models, big impact: Nvidia recently published a research paper - "Small models are the future of agentic AI". Smallest AI builds the high-accuracy models that customers can run at the edge consuming little power. 💡 Happy customers: customers consistently told us how much they enjoyed working with the team. For anyone building enterprise voice AI agents, please reach out and we'll be happy to connect you with the team! #voiceAI #ai #tts #asr #slm

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Yesterday’s encounter that reminded me why protocols matter more than platforms. Had an inspiring conversation with Rajeesh Menon, whose work spans the entire digital infrastructure ecosystem that’s quietly revolutionizing how we think about systemic change. From EkStep Foundation to Beckn Open Collective, Rajeesh embodies something crucial: building systems that serve rather than surveil, that empower rather than extract. What excites me most is exploring how our community-driven approach (SAOcommons) to human capital indexing (WellbeingProtocol) could plug into this broader ecosystem of digital public / common goods. The goal? Value redistribution that’s signal-based and equitable rather than platform-captured. But this conversation also surfaced some critical questions I’m wrestling with: 1) “Emission” vs “Collection” of data 2) Deep Thinkers' Collective. 3) Anti-hive-mind design - How does TheInternetOfValue preserve individual agency while enabling collective intelligence? 4) “Weaponising” context ? If you’re working on systems that put livelihoods with dignity at the center, Rajeesh Menon is building something remarkable. Worth following his journey. Thanks for the active listening and questions, Rajeesh!

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