India Should Build Companies With Musk's Ambition: Krishan Rattan of Terra Invest on Modi and AI

I want India to become a natural place to build an exceptionally ambitious technology company. A founder working on scientific discovery, autonomous machines or advanced manufacturing should be able to assemble the expertise and infrastructure needed to attempt a difficult problem here. That is the scale of opportunity I see in the combination of AI and national industrial capability.

Elon Musk divides opinion, often for good reason, but one part of his method deserves separate consideration: the willingness to take responsibility for problems that cross several fields at once, so that the company has to work out how the whole system can function. Indian founders have as much claim to that level of ambition as anyone, including in areas that look unfamiliar to conventional technology investors.

At Terra Invest, I see the Indian government’s focus on technology and national capacity as a serious foundation for this future. The March 2024 approval of more than Rs 10,300 crore for the IndiaAI Mission covered a five-year programme spanning compute, data, skills, applications and startup support. The breadth of that design matters because a country develops an industry through connected capabilities. Delivered together, compute, data and funding can put serious resources behind a generation of founders.

The measure of progress I find most interesting is how effectively those capabilities let us learn. A computer supplies capacity. A well-designed experimental process turns capacity into new knowledge. A team that repeatedly deploys a system, observes its failures and improves the next version can accumulate expertise that extends beyond the equipment it first acquired.

That gives deployment speed a deeper significance. If Indian companies can test a new generation of machines and incorporate the results sooner, they can develop an advantage even when others have access to comparable models. Testing facilities, operating permissions and experienced engineers determine how quickly computation becomes practical knowledge. That whole process deserves to be treated as part of the country’s research capacity.

India has demanding environments in which to develop that expertise. Language changes across places and contexts. Industrial conditions vary. Products may need to work with unreliable inputs, unfamiliar terminology or physical settings that were never designed for automation. With appropriate permissions and feedback, solving these problems could produce technology capable of succeeding in many other countries.

That is a more ambitious way to understand the domestic market. The valuable asset is the opportunity to learn from a rich range of real conditions and turn that knowledge into products. A multilingual system that handles difficult communication well can travel. A robot that adapts reliably to varied industrial settings can travel. The experience gained while solving a local problem can become a global advantage.

We should make the path from experiment to deployment easier for capable founders. I favour accessible testing facilities, transparent evaluation and procurement arrangements that give young companies a fair opportunity to demonstrate useful results. These are practical ways for public institutions to help build an innovation environment. The entrepreneur still has to create a product that earns its place.

For example, a factory could evaluate competing systems against a common task without sending confidential production data away. Open interfaces could let it combine models and equipment from different suppliers. That arrangement would give young companies an opportunity to prove themselves and give customers more control over what they operate. We should design an ecosystem where evidence of performance can travel and useful components can be improved independently.

Energy and physical infrastructure belong in the same discussion. Scientific AI can lead to laboratories. Robotics requires machines, facilities and operating experience. Advanced manufacturing needs dependable power and suppliers who can deliver precision. When these resources connect, founders spend more of their effort on the problem they set out to solve.

This is why I take the broader industrial ambition seriously, under this government and any that follows it. A sustained national direction can encourage people to invest in capabilities with a long development horizon. It can also change the ambitions considered reasonable. The founder of a new Indian company should be able to see a credible path from a difficult technical idea to a product used around the world.

The objective should leave plenty of room for independent judgment. India’s most important future businesses may emerge in fields that no national programme can identify in advance. Public foundations should be broad enough to support that variety. The value of a capable ecosystem is that it allows many people to attempt different answers.

Musk is a useful reference for the size of the undertaking. India’s next great company may look very different from any of his businesses. It could develop scientific instruments, autonomous systems for oceans or a new manufacturing process. I am interested in founders willing to connect the relevant disciplines and keep working until a consequential capability exists.

Each successful effort can leave behind trained engineers, more capable suppliers and knowledge that supports the next company. That is how industrial strength compounds. If India combines AI access with an environment that lets people build and learn at that level, I believe this technology agenda could help unlock a generation of globally important founders. Government can set the conditions. Founders will decide what gets built.