Navya Naveli Nanda Has Launched Naveli Ventures To Back Deep-Tech And Frontier Research

Navya Naveli Nanda has formally launched Naveli Ventures, the venture arm of the Nanda Family Office, to invest in deep-tech, space, artificial intelligence, clean energy, advanced manufacturing and health.

The firm will deploy through direct startup investments, commitments to institutional funds, co-investments, and academic and intellectual property partnerships, with an emphasis on research-led and frontier technologies. Nanda announced it on social media and said it had been in development for some time.

She said the firm is not chasing quick returns, and that the family office's relationships across industry, government, academia and the investor community can be used to support the companies it backs.

Naveli Ventures LLP was incorporated in March 2023, with Navya Naveli Nanda and Agastya Nanda as designated partners. Nanda is listed as managing partner. No fund size, cheque range or existing portfolio has been disclosed.

The family office is associated with the Nanda business group, which includes Escorts Kubota, the farm and construction equipment manufacturer. Nanda recently completed the blended postgraduate programme for working professionals and entrepreneurs at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

The launch arrives as India expands state support for the category. The government's ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation scheme and the ₹10,000 crore Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0, notified in April, both direct money towards deep-tech and technology-led manufacturing.

Private capital has moved the same way. India Deep Tech Alliance data put deep-tech funding at $2.1 billion across 289 deals in 2025, lifting its share of Indian venture and private equity activity to 15 per cent from 4 per cent in 2016, with AI funding up 58 per cent to $1.22 billion across 188 deals.

Family offices making this move is the pattern, and the timing is the interesting part.

Indian family offices have historically invested in real estate, listed equities and businesses adjacent to whatever the family already owns. Deep-tech is none of those. It has long development cycles, binary technical risk and exits that arrive a decade out, which is close to the opposite of what wealth-preservation capital usually wants.

What makes it rational now is that the alternative has got harder. Conventional venture returns in India have been compressing, and this year's data shows capital concentrating into fewer and later rounds, with seed funding down 37 per cent and first-time funded companies down 30. A family office entering ordinary consumer internet in 2026 would be arriving late to a crowded, expensive market.

Deep-tech is the opposite problem: fewer competitors for deals, longer horizons and a state actively subsidising the category. For capital that does not need liquidity on a fund's ten-year clock, that is a more sensible place to be unusual.

What has not been said is the size. There is no disclosed corpus, no cheque range and no announced investments, which makes this a statement of intent rather than a deployable fund. The firm's LLP has existed since March 2023, so the structure is not new. What is new is the public commitment to a sector, and the test of that will be what appears on the portfolio page.

The structure matters more than the announcement, and it is the part worth watching.

Investing through four routes at once, direct deals, fund commitments, co-investments and academic partnerships, is unusual for a new firm and closer to how a long-horizon endowment behaves than a venture fund. The academic and intellectual property leg is the most distinctive. Indian deep-tech frequently originates in IITs and national laboratories, where the research exists but the path from a paper to a company is poorly serviced. Money that can sit at that stage is genuinely scarce.

It is also the slowest kind of capital to show results, which is presumably why the firm is positioning itself on patience rather than returns.

Against that, the gap between what the state is deploying and what the category can absorb is the real constraint. The ₹1 lakh crore RDI scheme and ₹10,000 crore Fund of Funds 2.0 dwarf what a family office can commit. The binding problem in Indian deep-tech is not a shortage of cheques at the earliest stage; it is the number of research teams that become companies at all, and the shortage of later capital when they need to build hardware.

Where a family office can be useful is precisely in the relationships Nanda described. A manufacturer like Escorts Kubota is a plausible first customer and manufacturing partner for an industrial robotics or advanced materials company, and that is worth more to a deep-tech founder than most term sheets.

The number to look for is the first investment. Sector lists are easy to write and portfolios are not.

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